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In the Breaking of the Bread 



By James I. Vance, D.D. 



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In the Breaking of 
the Bread 

A Volume of Communion Addresses 



a By 
JAMES i/ VANCE, D.D.. L.L. D. 

Author of "The Life of Service" " The Rise of a 

Soul" "The Young Man Four- Square" "The 

Silver on the Iron Cross," "Tendency" etc. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

LONDOJN AND EDINBURGH 



Copyright, 1922, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 






Printed in the Umted Statu of Amtrica 



New York : ! 58 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 1 7 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street 



MAI 23 1922 
©CI.A661767 



Introductory Note 

NEVER shall I forget the impression made 
upon me by the remark of a Scotchman 
about the Lord's Supper. He was the 
" pro " on the golf links of the Country Club. He 
had but recently brought his " lines " from the old 
country. 

With an awesome look in his face, and in a tone 
of deepest reverence, he said: " I'm not forgetting, 
Dominie, that it's the sacrament next Sunday, and 
nothing shall keep me away." 

It was not so much what he said as it was the 
way he said it. The traditions of a deeply re- 
ligious race dissolved in the blood of many genera- 
tions were speaking. 

To the Scotch, the sacrament of the Lord's Sup- 
per is the " holy of holies " in Christian experience. 
Well for all of us if our reverence for that high 
hour were greater. Better for the Church if the 
holy mystery of the Presence could cast its spell 
on modern life until recreation as well as wor- 
ship feel its hallowing touch. He has found a 
sanctuary in the common place whose soul is up- 
lifted and summoned by the very thought of the 
sacrament, until he resolves that nothing shall be 
permitted to break his tryst with his Saviour. 

5 



6 INTKODUCTOKY NOTE 

It is with the hope that these communion ad- 
dresses may help to cultivate such a mood that I 
am sending them out. If they shall direct medita- 
tion as the heart prepares for the solemn hour 
when we meet Him at the table ; if they shall serve 
to quicken faith and kindle love ; if they can some- 
how show His friends in any helpful way what 
"greater love" has done that He should be re- 
membered, then these communion talks will serve 
their purpose. 

The old-fashioned custom of a preparatory serv- 
ice preceding communion has largely fallen into 
disuse ; and the Church has not gained by its omis- 
sion. But there is a preparation which the heart 
can make in the solitude of self-examination, as 
the soul contemplates the holy mysteries shadowed 
forth in the sacrament. 

It is my hope that this little volume may be 
found by some who love Him a help as they thus 
prepare. 

J. I. V. 

Nashville, Tenn, 





Contents 




I. 


In the Breaking of the Bread 


9 


II. 


The Holy Supper . 


■ 17 


III. 


The Mystical Friendship 


. 25 


IV. 


Christ Liveth in Me 


. 3i 


V. 


The Glory of the Cross 


. 38 


VI. 


The Power of the Cross 


■ 45 


VII. 


Cross-Bearing .... 


• 53 


VIII. 


Peace ! Perfect Peace ! 


. 62 


IX. 


The Union of Communion 


. 69 


X. 


The New Communion in the 






Kingdom .... 


■ 76 


XI. 


The Necessity of the RESURR£CTIO^ 


1 85 


XII. 


The Glorious Death 


88 


XIII. 


Taking Christ from the Cross 


95 


XIV. 


The Human Christ . 


103 


XV. 


The Divine Christ . 


in 


XVI. 


Why Christ is Not Forgotten 


120 


XVII. 


Jesus Only 


127 


Vxviii. 


"Of Me" 


134 


XIX. 


The Program of the Upper Room . 


141 


XX. 


Inside the Cup . 


151 


XXL 


Where Suffering and Glory Blend 
7 


156 



S 



8 CONTENTS 

XXII. From the Communion Table to 

Perjury 162 

XXIII. Can the World Reproduce Cal- 

vary? 171 

XXIV. Memory and Hope at the Commun- 

ion Table 178 



IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD 

■ They told . . . how he was known of them in break- 
ing of bread" — Luke 24 : 35. 

IT was near midnight after one of the strangest 
days the world has ever known. Wonderful 
things had taken place that day, and so rap- 
idly there was little time for reflection, and so 
marvellous that had there been time to reflect, re- 
flection would only have deepened amazement. 

The day was the day of the resurrection. That 
morning Christ had risen from the dead. The rock 
tomb was rent, and the dead Saviour walked forth 
into the world and showed Himself to Mary in the 
garden. Peter and John had visited the tomb, and 
had brought back the story of the empty sepulchre 
and of the angel's message. It was the night of 
that strange day. 

The place, I think, was the upper room, the 
chamber in which Christ met for the last time with 
His friends. There was no place on earth more 
sacred. It seems to have been the only home the 
disciples had. There Jesus washed His disciples' 
feet. There the Holy Supper was instituted. 
There the early church gathered in prayer. There 

9 



10 IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD 

Pentecost came to pass. And there Jesus appeared 
again and again to His own. Never was there a 
place more consecrated. No cathedral was ever 
fuller of a Divine Presence. And yet it was just 
the upper room. But if ever there was a sanctuary, 
it was there. Nine men wait in the upper room. 
There is wonder in their faces. They are talking 
over the strange events of the day, of Mary's mes- 
sage. Perhaps they recall the last night He was 
with them, of where He sat, of how He looked, of 
the tones of His voice as He spoke to them, and 
then of how He broke the bread and passed the 
cup. Thus the night wore on. 

Suddenly the door opened. The two missing 
disciples hurriedly enter. They were not expected 
so soon. They had gone to Emmaus that day to 
spend the night, and here they are back at mid- 
night. Something has happened. What can it be ? 
Is there some new peril ? Does some fresh danger 
impend? There is an air of suppressed excitement 
about these two men as they enter the upper room. 
Instantly every man is on his feet. Directly they 
are listening with their souls in their faces. Their 
hearts beat faster as they listen. They catch their 
breath. It is all so strange and wonderful and 
heavenly. 

The men tell of the journey to Emmaus, of how 
as they went, one joined them. He inspired them 
with confidence, and they opened their hearts and 
told him all. They told him of their loss, and of 



IN THE BEEAKING OF THE BBEAD 11 

their Master's crucifixion. Then he expounded to 
them the Scriptures, until their hearts burned with 
eager hope. When they reached their destination 
he made as if he would go on, but they constrained 
him to stop and sup with them. Now they are 
describing the evening meal. With difficulty they 
control themselves as they speak of it. " He sat 
down with us, and taking bread in His hands, He 
blessed it, and broke it, and as He did so we saw 
Him. Our eyes were opened. It was the Master ! 
We saw Him for one glorious, radiant instant, and 
then He vanished. But it was long enough for us 
to make sure. It was Jesus. It was He Who was 
nailed to the tree, Whom we laid in the tomb. He 
is not dead. He is alive. We have walked and 
talked with Him, and He was known to us in the 
breaking of the bread ! " 

Such was the story the two men told at the mid- 
night hour in the upper room. How it must have 
thrilled that little company, and filled the disciples 
with ecstasy as they told how He was known of 
them in breaking of bread! Perhaps the story 
does not thrill us as it thrilled them. We have 
grown used to it. The glamour is gone. Our 
hearts do not burn so easily. But the message is 
ours; the fact that the glory of the presence of the 
risen Christ broke through the barriers which di- 
vide two worlds, and flashed out in conscious rec- 
ognition on the faith of His disciples in the break- 
ing of the bread is for us and for all who love Him. 



12 IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD 

The Revealing Christ 

Jesus reveals Himself in the breaking of the 
bread. That was the message. Think of what it 
must have meant to those men in the upper room ! 
It should not mean less to His disciples to-day as 
they gather in hallowed remembrance to partake of 
the symbols of His passion. 

As they listened, the disciples said: "The Mas- 
ter is not trying to hide from us. He would not 
conceal Himself. He is seeking to show His face, 
and to meet us. The mystery of His presence is 
not a rare experience for the privileged few in 
some exceptional and exalted moment, but it is for 
all, and it is to be had in the homely hours of 
common toil, for He shows Himself in the break- 
ing of the bread." 

It was just a loaf of common bread. Christ % 
took the poor man's fare and made it the symbol 
\l and medium of blessing. He joined the highest 
and rarest of spiritual privileges to the daily por- 
tion of the poor, just as though He would say: 
" My best is for all. If one has no more than a 
loaf of bread, he may still have divinity for a 
guest." 

Is it not something to believe in a Saviour Who 
reveals Himself through bread, through the homely 
fare of the common life? Jesus is not an aristo- 
crat. He belongs to the needy world, and associ- 
ates in holy hours of fellowship through the hum- 



IN THE BEEAKING OF THE BEEAD 13 

ble and lowly things of life. Such a Presence 
transforms all, and makes even want itself a sacra- 
ment. 

As they heard how He was known in the break- 
ing of the bread, the disciples think of that last 
night when He took bread and blessed it, and said; 
" This is my body which is for you." They begin 
to see what the Saviour meant, that it was not a 
common meal but a sacrament, and that He was to 
show Himself to them down the years in the break- 
ing of bread. Thus in a hallowed memorial they 
were to communicate with Him. The bread was 
the sacramental symbol of His presence. So with 
awesome reverence in their little meetings they be- 
gan to observe the supper as an act of faith. The 
mystic Presence of the table at Emmaus was given 
to them also, until down the years Jesus has been 
making Himself known to His disciples in the 
breaking of the bread. ' 

Christ reveals Himself to His friends when we 
think of Him and talk about Him and try to serve 
Him, when in some act of charity or kindness we 
minister to others in His name. But Jesus shows 
Himself to us in the breaking of the bread. He 
said: "This do in remembrance of me." To the 
devout soul who reverently partakes of the symbol 
of mystic fellowship at the holy table there is 
granted a glimpse into the glory. As at Emmaus, 
so always. Christ is near, until you can look 
across the table and see Him. 



14 IN THE BBEAKING OF THE BKEAD 

" Speak to Him now, for He hears thee, 
And spirit with spirit doth meet, 
He is closer to thee than breathing, 
Nearer than hands and feet." 

This is the doctrine of a real Presence which 
every Christian may cherish, not the crude tenet 
that wine is changed to blood and bread to flesh at 
the say-so of a priest, but that the Saviour associ- 
ates Himself with the divinely appointed symbols 
of His passion, and through these symbols which 
tell the story of His love, and to those who partake 
in faith, He makes Himself known. 

If so, can I afford to neglect the holy table? 
Can I despise the communion season, and approach 
it with low and common thoughts, or with selfish 
and carnal views? Those two disciples nearly 
missed the blessing. Let us beware lest, Christ 
walking and talking with us, we should miss seeing 
Him because we do not sit with Him at the table 
and have Him break to us the bread of life. 



The Christ Who Makes Himself Known 

It is the crucified Christ Who is known in the 
breaking of the bread. This is the message of the 
sacrament. It tells us that Jesus died. Those 
men saw this at Emmaus. There was the print of 
the nails and of the thorns. Christ is careful to 
tell us this. As often as we eat the bread and drink 
the cup, we do show forth His death till He come. 



IN THE BEEAKING OP THE BEEAD 15 

But it was also the risen Christ. That was the 
thrilling news the two men brought their comrades. 
It was what made them retrace the weary miles 
that fateful night. They returned to Jerusalem 
not to say: " Jesus is dead! " but to declare: " He 
lives ! " Some seem to think it makes little differ^ 
ence whether one believes in the resurrection or « 
not. Such people have never had a real sacrament. 
" Now is Christ risen from the dead. ,, No dead 
Christ could stir the world as Christ is stirring it. 
" Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world ! " A dead Christ could not fulfill that 
promise. " Christ ever liveth to make intercession 
for us," and His prayers are not dead prayers. He 
has promised to come again. He is in His people, 
in the world. He is inescapable, unavoidable. 
Christ lives! 

It is also the present Christ Who is known in the 
breaking of the bread. Jesus is not far away. He 
is with us. The Holy Supper is the sacrament of 
the eternal Presence. Jesus is not in the tomb, nor 
in the distant heaven with some great gulf of 
darkness between Him and His own. He is here. 
We may not always realize His presence. We 
may not see Him. But it is not because He Him- 
self is unreal and His presence fictitious, but rather 
because, like Mary, our eyes are poor, rather be- 
cause we, too, are slow to believe. 

Christ is with us. Heaven is at our doorstep. 
Jesus is at the table. It is always so. The stran- 



16 IN THE BEEAKING OF THE BEEAD 

gest thing that awesome night took place as the two 
men were telling their story. Suddenly they be- 
came conscious of another presence in the room. 
No door had opened, but Jesus was there. They 
thought they had left Him behind at Emmaus, but 
He is with them, among them. He is showing the 
print of the nails. He is saying: " Peace be unto 
you ! " He is talking with His friends as He did 
in the old days. So it is always, in shadowy, spiri- 
tual outline, but in real protecting presence, Jesus is 
with us. The Christ Who hung on the cross is at 
our table. Just across, we can hear the beating of 
His heart. His hands are reaching out toward 
us. We hear His voice. We see His face. He 
is not distant. He is here. This is the mes- 
sage of the sacrament. In times of temptation, in 
hours of loneliness, in sorrow and need, Jesus is 
with us to sustain and comfort, to preserve us unto 
the end, until, having finished, we shall see Him 
face to face, and know as we are known. 

Oh, for mysticism enough to break away from 
the bondage of sense and feel the spell of an unseen 
Presence, and catch a glimpse of the face Whose 
smile is heaven! We would see Jesus. May He 
show Himself to His friends as they gather around 
His table! May He speak until the heart burns! 
May He sit at the table and Himself bless the sym- 
bols of hallowed remembrance, until faith con- 
quers the barriers which divide two worlds ! 



II 

THE HOLY SUPPER 

"As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do 
show the Lord's death till he come." — i Corinthians 11:26. 

THE Holy Supper tells the story of Chris- 
tianity in the days of the apostles, and in 
all days since the apostles, in Christian 
lands and in all lands, in its apparent defeats and 
in its unquestioned triumphs, whether regarded as 
a doctrinal system or a ritual of worship or an 
ethical revolution or a passion for a person or an 
enthusiasm for a kingdom. However Christianity 
may be regarded or estimated or interpreted, its 
entire story is packed into and inseparably bound 
up with the simple memorial observance of the 
Holy Supper. 

There can be no doubt but Christ meant the 
Holy Supper to tell the story, so that if a day 
should come when His followers had no one to 
teach them, the sacrament of the Holy Supper 
might teach them; so that if a time should come 
when the Church had no hymns, no preachers, and 
no formal worship, its people might still meet and 
break bread and remember Him; so that if there 
should come a time when the Bible itself was taken 

17 



18 THE HOLY SUPPKB 

from them, they might have in this simple memo- 
rial of His dying love a revelation and a proclama- 
tion of the truth that saves the world. 

A Perpetual Sacrament 

The Holy Supper was to be perpetual. — "As 
often as ye eat" — was the Saviour's word. Its 
observance was to be frequent. The practice of 
the early disciples seems to have been to break 
bread whenever they came together. Familiarity, 
however, breeds contempt, and soon reverence was 
dulled. The Holy Supper came to be treated as a 
common meal, and there came about a shameful 
condition of things which Paul rebukes in this 
chapter. In eating, some were hungry, and some 
drunken. Thus by experience was established the 
wisdom of definite communion seasons in the 
Church. 

The frequency with which the Holy Supper is 
to be observed is not to be settled by any hard and 
fast rule. Some churches observe it every Lord's 
Day, others at intervals of from two to three 
months. It is certainly an advantage in the way 
of intensified devotion and deepened reverence 
when the table is not approached too often. One 
who looks occasionally at a great mountain uplift, 
or gazes across a vast expanse of open sea, has his 
soul stirred ; but those who see it all the time soon 
cease to see it. The Mount of Transfiguration was 
a great place for a spiritual rapture, but it was a 



THE HOLY SUPPER 19 

poor location for a permanent residence. The 
Holy Supper is not to be observed so often that we 
shall lose our awesome reverence and cease to re- 
gard it as holy ground. Nevertheless, we are not 
to forget that if it is to bless us, it must be kept 
again and again, for this was the Saviour's com- 
mand. We are to keep it often because our souls 
need the help that comes in this way, and because 
the truths the Holy Supper proclaims are truths we 
cannot ponder too much nor learn too well. 

Such has been the history of the Holy Supper as 
the centuries have come and gone. It has been a 
symbol along which faith has passed from genera- 
tion to generation. It has been a bond of union 
between the saints in all ages of the Christian 
Church. It has kept alive the holy flames on the 
altar of the heart's devotion. Kingdoms have 
come and gone. Great churches have been erected 
and have fallen into decay. Sects have risen, 
flourished, and had their day. Continents have 
been discovered. Men's ideas about the universe 
have undergone a radical change. The very civili- 
zation of the race has altered. But through it all 
the noblest, knightliest, gentlest spirits have kept 
this simple feast. 

Under what widely differing circumstances they 
have kept it ! Sometimes in the sunlit open, some- 
times hunted like wild beasts, they have fled for 
cover to caves and tombs to eat the bread and drink 
the sacramental cup. Sometimes in some gorgeous 



20 THE HOLY SUPPEE 

ceremonial of Church or State, when a pontiff was 
consecrated, or a monarch was crowned, and some 
august dynasty had its day of days, and sometimes 
when the red wine of the cup was atoned for with 
the life blood of the celebrant, — still through all 
the years the feast has been kept by all classes and 
kindreds and nations and tongues, for its speech of 
hallowed symbolism is a language all can under- 
stand. As they have gathered high and low, king 
and peasant, soldier and monk, earthly distinctions 
have disappeared, for all have felt the spell of that 
Presence which makes us one. 

As we come to the communion table, we push 
our way into this goodly company whose presence 
overflows all the tides of time, and the song of 
whose devotion must not be out of harmony with 
that which fills the arches of heaven itself. As we 
partake of the sacramental emblems, we enter into 
the fellowship of all those who in all the earth 
keep the feast,— of our brothers and sisters in 
other churches ! How small our differences when 
we sit at the same table ! We have fellowship with 
those in other lands, also, who have been gathered 
out of the non-Christian nations, with missionaries 
on the frontier, and also with that innumerable 
company who have crossed the flood and who have 
passed from the Church militant to the Church 
triumphant. We are not divided. 

But this is not the only message the Holy Sup- 
per utters. It speaks not simply of those who keep 



THE HOLY SUPPER 21 

the feast, but chiefly of Him in Whose sweet mem- 
ory the feast is kept. 

The Sacrament of His Death 

The Holy Supper proclaims the Saviour's death. 
As we take the bread, it speaks of His body 
wounded and bruised, of the nails driven through 
His hands and feet, of the thorns which pierced 
His brow, of the spear that was thrust into His 
blessed side, of His great weariness, and of the body 
taken from the cross and lovingly laid in Joseph's 
tomb. As we touch the chalice of wine to our lips, 
it speaks to us of the blood of Jesus, of the blood- 
drops in the garden, of the blood shed on the cross, 
of that crimson tide which cleanses the guilty soul 
and makes us white as snow. 

The Holy Supper shows the death of Christ. 
Jesus would keep forever fresh in the hearts of His 
people the remembrance of His death. He would 
not have them lose or forget the least detail or the 
slightest incident connected with it. Whenever 
the Supper is kept, it is as though the sacramental 
emblems would say: " Come, look into the face of 
the dead Christ, and worship the wounds of the 
Redeemer ! " 

It is His death that saves us. The thought that 
He loved us enough to die for us makes us better. 
The contemplation of a love so steadfast and di- 
vine that it did not draw back at the cross gives us 
hope. The penalty He paid there on the accursed 



22 THE HOLY SUPPEB 

tree forever emancipates us from condemnation. 
What an atonement is the death of Christ! 

And so we eat the bread and drink the cup, and 
proclaim that Christ died. This is what Christ's 
followers have been doing for two thousand years. 
They have not been trying to hide their Leader's 
death, or to conceal a fact which to the world 
would seem a certain sign of defeat. They have 
been boasting of it. As believers have gathered 
through the passing years, they have been saying 
to each other and to the world: " He died. Our 
God died." He is the only God in the annals of 
worship Who is not afraid to have His followers 
say it of Him, and the reason He is not afraid is 
that His death is His people's deathless hope. 

The Sacrament of His Return 

The Holy Supper predicts that Christ will come 
again. It shows His death till He comes. He 
died, but He is not dead. He is coming. Death 
did not even stop Him. The cross was merely a 
station on the road Christ travelled. Therefore, so 
far from being a defeat, it was a glorious victory. 

What are we to understand by Christ's return? 
The Church has been perplexed to know. The 
early disciples looked for a speedy return, but the 
centuries have come and gone, and still the Church 
kneels with its face toward the coming Christ and 
prays: " Oh, Lord, tarry not, but come! " It can- 
not refer to His resurrection, for it was His ascen- 



THE HOLY SUPPER 23 

sion promise. It must mean more than His com- 
ing at death when the shadow door opens and we 
see Him face to face. He is coming in the life of 
the world, in its laws and institutions, in its chari- 
ties and philanthropies, in the very character of its 
civilization, in the kingdom that is coming. Must 
it not, however, mean more than this? For the 
promise is not till we go to Him, till we are like 
Him, till His kingdom come, but till He come. It 
is a prophecy of the personal return of Jesus. 

Christ is coming. This is the hope which sus- 
tained the early Christians, and made them in- 
vincible. Christ was not going from them, but 
coming toward them. His face was turned to- 
ward them. They were afraid of nothing. Sac- 
rifice was easy. Persecution was privilege. Mar- 
tyrdom was ecstasy. They stood it all, and died 
without sob or tear or regret, with a song which 
ceased not until their pallid lips lost the power of 
speech. 

The Holy Spirit speaks to us of this sublime 
hope. It proclaims that Christ died, and predicts 
that He is coming. He is on His way. He is 
more in the world than ever. He is Christ with 
a future. He is not merely a dead Christ with a 
withered wreath on the closed door of a stone 
tomb, but He is a living, rejoicing, conquering, 
coming Christ, with a crown and a kingdom. 

Let us rejoice and be confident, as we eat the 
bread and drink the cup ; for every time we keep the 



24 THE HOLY SUPPER 

Holy Supper, faith is strengthened and courage 
increased. All the sublime values of the Gospel 
are certified to us as personal and present as- 
sets. The past is holy and the future secure. We 
rise with the morning light in our faces, and the 
coronation hymn on our lips. Christ is coming. 
Hallelujah! 



Ill 

THE MYSTICAL FRIENDSHIP 

"Ye are my. friends, if ye do whatsoever I command 
ypu."— John 15 : 14. 

JESUS speaks of the mystical friendship. He 
does not mean that His friendship is a myth, 
for no friendship is less mythical, more real, 
more substantial. He means that His friendship is 
a mystery, and a mystery not in the sense that it is 
mysterious, obscure, incomprehensible, but in the 
sense that it is revealed. It is a thing we would 
never have known unless God had told us about it. 
It is a mystery in the sense Paul meant when, 
speaking of the Christian's immortality, he said: 
" Behold, I shew you a mystery, a holy secret, a 
divine and eternal reality. We shall not all sleep, 
but we shall all be changed/' In this sense, Jesus' 
friendship is a mystery, a holy secret, a divine and 
eternal reality God has revealed. 

It is a sacramental friendship, for it is a friend- 
ship commemorated each time faith partakes of 
the sacred emblems of the Saviour's passion. Its 
love glows in the mystic, hallowed light of the 
Eucharist, and flames in lambent devotion around 
the communion table, until that humble altar be- 
comes more glorious than a sapphire throne, and 

25 



26 THE MYSTICAL FRIENDSHIP 

its sweet content fills the heart with a deep and 
eternal peace. 

For this mystical friendship is none other than 
the friendship between the divine and the human, 
between God and man, between the Saviour of the 
world and sinners forgiven. Can it be that such 
a friendship exists? Christ declares that it does. 
Revelation lifts the veil, and says: " Behold, I shew 
you a mystery. Ye are my friends." It is a won- 
derful friendship. 

Christ for a Friend 

It is a blessed thing for us to have Christ for a 
friend, — not a judge, not a far-off personality 
veiled in awesome authority, not merely a guide or 
a teacher, not only a Redeemer, but a friend. One 
good friend saves the day. He changes the world, 
and makes life endurable. I recall a visit a home- 
sick Dane once made me. He had a close friend. 
They had become estranged. His heart was 
broken. His life was plunged in gloom. He was 
going back to Denmark, not because he had lost 
his work or his health, but because he had lost his 
friend. What a privilege to have for your friend 
the Son of God, the supreme Ruler of the world ! 

We have such a friend. We may not have 
many other friends. We may have few worldly 
friends, but none so poor and humble and unat- 
tractive as to be without one friend, and that One 
the best. 



THE MYSTICAL PEIENDSHIP 27 

The proof of Christ's friendship is as strong as 
it can be made. " Greater love hath no man than 
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." 
Christ seems to say: "I will prove to you that I 
am your friend. I will die for you, dear soul." 
And He did. He laid down His life for us. Can 
we doubt Him after this ? It is easier to doubt the 
character of God than the friendship of Jesus. 

This is the message of the sacrament. It speaks 
to us of the mystical friendship. It declares that 
Jesus is our friend. Do you need a friend ? There 
is Jesus. Do you need someone to understand and 
comfort you? There is Jesus. Let Him be your 
friend, your closest, dearest friend. Tell all to 
Him. Live your life in the courage of this faith, 
with your daily experience sweetened and sancti- 
fied by the mystical friendship. 

" What a friend we have in Jesus ! " 

Christ's Friends 
It is a holy thing for Christ to have us for His 
friends. He claims us. He says : " Ye are my 
friends." He says : " Greater love hath no man 
than this, that a man lay down his life for his 
friends." "Therefore I am your friend." But 
this is not all. " Therefore ye are my friends, — 
not my servants, my subjects, not merely my apos- 
tles, my disciples and ambassadors, but something 
better, — my friends." 



28 THE MYSTICAL FEIElsTDSBDOP 

Have I ever thought of myself as a friend of 
Christ ? He is mine, but am I His ? Have others 
ever thought of me as Christ's friend? As they 
have looked at me, have they said: " There goes a 
friend of Jesus Christ"? Could anything finer 
ever be said of me ? Am I as true to Him as He 
is to me ? Am I as ready to confess His cause as 
He is to champion mine ? Am I as willing to lay 
down my life for Him as He was ready to lay 
down His life for me? 

He has told us the proof of His friendship for 
us. It was His death. He has also told us the 
proof of our friendship for Him. We are to do 
His commandments. Could anything be simpler? 
We are just to do His will, to do the things He 
told us, to practise His teachings, to follow in His 
footsteps. In this way do we show that we are 
His friends. Let me do my duty as it comes to 
me day by day, with faith in Him, and I am His 
friend. It may be something that never wins a 
cheer from the people about me, but if it pleases 
Him, if it makes Christ happy, my reward is com- 
plete. 

The sacrament is saying this also. " Ye are 
Christ's friends if ye do whatsoever He commands 
you." Let us make life sacramental with this re- 
solve. It is not enough to offer worship. We 
must also do His will. As we do, the little deeds 
of life, like the bramble on Sinai, become flaming 
shekinahs out of which God speaks. 



THE MYSTICAL FEIENDSHIP 29 

The Treasures of the Mystical Friendship 
Because we are friends, Christ takes us into His 
confidence. He says : " Henceforth I call you not 
servants, for the servant knoweth not what his 
Lord doeth ; but I have called you friends, for all 
things that I have heard of my Father I have made 
known unto you." He shares the great secrets of 
the universe with His friends. This is one of the 
tests of friendship. There must be absolute confi- 
dence. Christ gives us His. Shall I decline to 
give Him mine? 

Because we are His friends, He enriches our 
lives, and makes us fruitful. He says: " Ye have 
not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained 
you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and 
that your fruit should remain." As we do His 
will, life is saved from barrenness. It is not diffi- 
cult to be useful. It is necessary only to do the 
Saviour's will. Then we are useful. Then do 
we bring forth fruit, and our fruit abides forever. 
The fruits of the mystical friendship never wither. 
Anything done for Christ is immortal. 

Because we are His friends, Christ invests us 
with influence, so that whatsoever we ask in His 
name is given us. Christ clothes His friends with 
august and imperial power. " Whatsoever " is a 
big word before the throne of the Almighty. No 
ambassador was ever given such credentials. No 
representative of royalty ever possessed such 



30 THE MYSTICAL FRIENDSHIP 

boundless influence. Christ's friends need only to 
go to God and ask what they will, and it is done. 

These are the promises of which the sacrament 
is the seal. If the sacred symbols of the Saviour's 
passion had a tongue, this is what they would say. 
This is what Christ does for His friends. He 
takes us into His confidence. Shall we decline to 
let Him ? He makes us fruitful. Shall we hinder 
His gracious desires? He invests us with influ- 
ence. Shall we limit His power? 

The mystical friendship is a seraphic friendship. 
Its light shines around the communion table. Its 
song is musical in the heart that yields its adoration 
at the altar of remembrance. Christ meets us in 
the mystery of communion, and says: " I am your 
friend. Ye are my friends. If you would make 
me happy, do the things I command you. Doing 
them, you shall know all that God has told me. 
You shall bring forth fruit that shall abide, and 
you shall have power to sway the will of God so 
that whatsoever you ask of Him shall be done." 

Oh, to be a friend of Christ, just a friend of 
Jesus Christ, a good, true, faithful, loyal, constant 
friend of Him Who loved me and gave Himself 
for me! 



IV 
CHRIST LIVETH IN ME 

"I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, 
but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the 
flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me 
and gave himself for me." — Gai,atians 2 : 20. 

ON July 1st, 1555, John Bradford was 
burned to death. He was chaplain to 
King Edward Sixth of England, and was 
one of the most popular preachers of his day. But 
he was a martyr to his faith. As he was being 
driven out to Newgate to be burned, permission 
was given him to speak, and from the wagon in 
which he rode to his death the entire way out from 
West London to Newgate he shouted : " Christ, 
Christ, none but Christ ! " John Bradford was 
feeling very much as Paul must have felt when 
he wrote this sublime line which will be our com- 
munion meditation. Only with Paul, it was not 
the outburst of a spasmodic elation, but the ex- 
pression of a life habit. " I am crucified with 
Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ 
liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the 
flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who 
loved me, and gave himself for me." 

Here are five startling statements, in each of 

31 



32 GHEIST LIVETH IN ME 

which a man reaches out into the infinite and lays 
hold of the eternal. 

Crucified With Christ 

" I am crucified with Christ" What a daring 
thing for a man to say ! Christ had been crucified. 
He had climbed the lonely thorn-path to that hill- 
top crowned with a cross. He had hung in sacri- 
ficial agony on the accursed tree. The nails had 
been driven through His hands and feet. The 
thorns had pierced His brow, and the spear-head 
had torn open His side. In the midnight of His 
passion for men, His anguished soul had cried: 
" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " 

And now Paul is saying: " I was there on the 
cross with Christ. I am crucified with Him. 
Every throb of agony He felt I have suffered. 
The nails have been driven into my hands and feet. 
The thorns have pierced my brow. Into my side, 
too, the spear has entered, and I have had moments 
when I could understand that lonely cry of the for- 
saken Christ. It is my cross as well as His. 
Look, I bear about in my body the marks of the 
Lord Jesus." 

It was a devoted soul struggling to say how he 
loved his Master, declaring that he was so utterly 
identified with Christ as to be a partaker of His 
passion, as to be branded with the marks and 
wounds of Calvary. " I am crucified with Christ." 
Can we say it ? Has there ever been a single mo- 



CHEIST LIVETH IN ME 33 

ment when we were so lost in the Saviour as to be 
able to say: " Christ, Christ, none but Christ! " 

" Nevertheless I Live " 

But the cross did not kill Christ. It immortal- 
ized Him. His enemies thought they were putting 
an end to His influence. They were only clearing 
the way for Christ to take the throne. But for 
His crucifixion, He would soon have ceased to live. 
In a little while He would have been forgotten. 

Paul is saying: "I thought I was dying when 
they crucified me with Christ, but I find that what 
I took to be the door of death was the gate of life. 
I have never been so much alive. I have become 
deathless. My foes are powerless to hurt me. 
Death itself is disarmed. I walk through the val- 
ley of death, nevertheless I live." 

The cross cannot kill Christ's friends. It is not 
the symbol of death, but of life. It is the badge 
of immortality. Those who die for a great cause 
do not die. They are alive forevermore. Death 
has not defeated them. It has only cleared the 
way to the throne. 

" Christ Liveth In Me " 

"Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Paul 
seems to say: " I am the same man that I was be- 
fore I was crucified with Christ, yet I am very 
different. I am a new man. I live because I am 



34 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME 

the incarnation of Him Who is the source of life. 
I can never die, because Christ liveth in me." 

Think of the life one should live who has come 
down from the cross to this sublime experience, 
who has made the marvellous discovery that Christ 
lives in him, who has in his own life experience 
the irrefutable proof that Christ is risen! Such 
an one must live as Christ lived. If Christ lives 
in him, he must think as Christ would think, and 
suffer as Christ would suffer, and serve as Christ 
would serve. His sole concern must be: " What 
would Christ have me do ? " 

Would you like to be able to say: " Christ liveth 
in me " ? You can never say it until you have been 
to Calvary, until you have been crucified with 
Christ. Nor can you ever say it unless you are 
willing to live His life and think His thoughts and 
share His suffering, unless you are willing to take 
up your cross and follow Him. " Christ liveth in 
me." My, how Paul is climbing! His hands are 
on the throne itself. It is so with all within whom 
Christ lives. 

"I Live By Faith" 

"And the life which I now live in the flesh I live 
by the faith of the Son of God." This is his ex- 
planation of his sublime experience. He seems to 
say: " You are asking how Christ lives in me. It 
is simple. It is the result of faith. I am still 
living an earthly life. I am human. I am no an- 



CHEIST LIVETH IN ME 35 

gel. I am far from being a saint. I am in the 
flesh. I am subject to law, and beset by tempta- 
tions, and hedged about by limitations, and forever 
struggling against the foes of my spirit. I am no 
wraith, but a man with all the frailties and faults 
of an ordinary mortal. But this flesh life that I 
live, I live by faith in the Son of God, and because 
I have faith in Him, He lives in me." 

Faith is the way we enter into the life of God. 
Faith is the secret of everything that is great. It 
reaches out into the infinite. It touches omnipo- 
tence and omniscience and omnipresence. It has 
contact with the eternal. We are still in the flesh. 
The voices of the flesh are crying in our blood. But 
we do not believe in the flesh. We believe in the 
Son of God. That is creed enough, just to believe 
in Him enough to be willing to share His cross 
with Him. That is theology enough. With such 
a faith as this, the commonplace becomes the vesti- 
bule of divinity. 

" By faith I am crucified with Christ. By faith 
death is vanquished. By faith Christ liveth in me. 
For the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith 
in Him. As I go about my daily work, as I walk 
the streets and meet my fellows, as I live this flesh 
life, I live not as an angel, for I am far from be- 
ing sanctified, but I do live by faith. I so utterly 
believe in the Son of God that He has become a 
part of me, that He has become my life, until His 
very wounds are mine." 



36 CHEIST LIVETH IN ME 

" Who Loved Me and Gave Himself for Me w 
The secret is out. It is love. That is what is 
back of faith. As Paul closes the sentence, he 
gives the secret away. There is a man hanging 
on a cross, but behind the cross is a man death 
cannot kill, and behind the man death cannot kill 
is Christ, and behind Christ is faith, and behind 
faith is love. Because there is love, it is easy to 
have faith, and because there is faith, it is easy to 
have Christ, and because there is Christ, it is easy 
to have life, and because there is life, the cross is 
not defeat, but victory. " Who loved me and gave 
himself for me." 

It is not hard to believe in one who does that for 
you. It is easy to trust someone who thinks more 
of you than of his own life. " Greater love hath 
no man than this, that a man lay down his life for 
his friends." Paul is saying that as he saw Christ 
hanging on the tree, he discovered that He was 
dying for him. Then he said to himself: " I must 
hang beside Him." And so he took his place be- 
side Christ on the cross, and as he did that, he 
found that Christ was not only dying for him, but 
living in him. 

Christ is the secret. Thinking about Him, 
dwelling with Him, following Him, preaching 
Him, loving Him, until you are like Him, — this is 
the purpose of communion. The sacramental sym- 
bols are saying: " He loved me and gave himself 
for me." They disclose the eternal secret. 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME 37 

Has that secret found expression in my experi- 
ence ? Does Christ live in me ? As I drive down 
the street to-morrow, is it with me: " Christ, 
Christ, none but Christ I" As I go about my work 
does Christ live in me ? Do men meet Christ when 
they meet me? This is where God expects the 
world to find Christ to-day — in the lives of His fol- 
lowers. When Michael Angelo painted his great 
pictures in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, instead of 
painting them on the walls of the chapel he fres- 
coed the ceiling with these marvellous creations of 
his art. And yet when the people go there to gaze 
at the pictures, they do not look up, but down. At 
the door each one, as he enters, is given a small 
mirror, and as he walks about he studies the won- 
derful pictures in the dome as they are reflected in 
the little mirror which he holds in his hand. Christ 
has gone up into the heavens, but the mirror is on 
earth. "Ye are my witnesses." Oh, that they 
may see Him in my life! If so, I must share Cal- 
vary with Him. I, too, must be able to say: " I 
am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet 
not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I 
now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of 
God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." 



THE GLORY OF THE CROSS 

" God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." — Gai,atians 6 : 14. 

AFTER much discussion and prolonged ar- 
gument about things not easy to under- 
stand, this is the conclusion Paul reaches. 
Is it a sane conclusion ? 

Is the apostle level-headed or flighty in his deter- 
mination to glory in the cross? Is his statement 
sound sense or a spasm of hysterics? No doubt 
the great majority of the people of his day thought 
Paul beside himself. In deference to public opin- 
ion, he himself seems to admit it, when he declares: 
" I have become a fool in glorying." 

Then the cross was a badge of shame. It was a 
stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. The 
world regarded it very much as we now regard the 
gallows. It was a mark of infamy, a symbol of 
the penalty for the worst of crimes. It was the 
fate society visited on those who were too danger- 
ous to be kept in prison, and too bad to be allowed 
to live. There is no glory in this sort of thing. 
We would call the man crazy who would boast of 
the gallows, who would take pride in suffering the 
severest penalty the law inflicts on red-handed 

38 



THE GLOEY OF THE CEOSS 39 

transgression. If this is what Paul means, he has 
worse than hysterics. It is not what he means. 

He had seen the cross in the light of Calvary, 
haloed with the love which redeems the world, 
consecrated by the sufferings not of a criminal, but 
of a Saviour, Who makes bad people good, rights 
wrong, comforts sorrow, and banishes evil from 
the world. He saw the cross as the symbol of the 
sufferings of God for His wayward and wandering 
children. He heard there the call of the Father 
for His own. He beheld the cross, not as the sym- 
bol of the penalty society inflicts on the worst, but 
as a token of the sufferings of the holiest and best 
to save the worst. He saw it as Christ had trans- 
formed it, into a sign of heroic self-sacrifice, and 
he said: " I glory in that! " 

Is this the boast of a crazy man? Is it wild and 
fanatical? Is it flighty and hysterical? Is it the 
mood of a man whose emotions have swept him 
from the moorings of sound judgment and ordi- 
nary sanity? 

Hero Worship 
What is more glorious than true heroism and 
real sacrifice ? The world worships heroism. The 
religion of the people is still hero worship, and it 
is not a bad religion. It would be a tame, stale 
world were heroism and sacrifice to go out of 
fashion, were deeds that are daring and dangerous 
and difficult no longer to be applauded. 



40 THE GLORY OF THE CROSS 

It is simply the glory of heroism, of dangerous 
and daring adventure, that the world worships to- 
day, — now of a man who flies in an airship, now 
of a crew who cross the ocean in a submarine, 
again of an explorer who three centuries ago 
pushed out into the wide, wild, trackless sea in a 
frail boat, and again of those who fight their way 
through fields of arctic ice and across perilous 
leads to the top of the world. The story of Henry 
Hudson is not the story of a man discovering a 
river. Anybody might do that. The discovery 
of the North River was a mere incident of Hud- 
son's career. The real story is that of a bold ex- 
plorer who adventured an unknown world ocean 
on a tiny craft, and who died at last on the frozen 
sea in quest of a northwest passage. 

The glory of the bold explorers who ever and 
again hold the centre of the stage as the world lis- 
tens to their story of hardship and heroism in quest 
of the earth's poles is not that they have added any- 
thing to the world's wealth or happiness. They 
have opened no new continent whither the down- 
trodden and oppressed of earth may flee for ref- 
uge. They have made no valuable contribution to 
the solution of the great problems of government 
and trade and social life. The world admires 
them because they have done or seem to have done 
a hard thing. They have been daring enough to 
jeopardize life in a difficult enterprise. 

This on a divine scale is the fascination of the 



THE GLOEY OP THE CEOSS 41 

cross of Christ The cross is the world's finest 
symbol of heroism. It is the highest expression 
of the life laid down. It is the loftiest standard of 
unselfish service and sacrifice. 

The cross is more than this. It does not stand 
for mere spectacular sacrifice, for ordinary news- 
paper heroism, for a barren exploit ending in fire- 
works and a dinner party. Calvary is not stagy. 
Its publicity is not intentional but incidental. Jesus 
did not die just to be dying. He died to bless peo- 
ple, to make the bad good, to heal the open sore of 
the world and banish evil from mankind. There 
is no such heroism as that of the Man of Galilee, 
and the thought of it down the ages has been stir- 
ring the sluggish pulses of a dying world, and lift- 
ing men to high ideals and noble deeds. Little 
wonder that one of the greatest and best of men 
should say: " God forbid that I should glory save 
in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ ! " 

What Christianity needs to-day is a fresh infu- 
sion of the heroic. It has grown soft and flabby 
with success. A cheap religion will never save the 
world. Ease and self-indulgence cannot speak to 
men in the tones of Calvary. The religion of the 
future, like the religion of the past, will be hero 
worship. 

The cross stands for the heroism of God, Who 
did not spare Himself in the hardest thing ever at- 
tempted by God or man. Paul was not glorying 
in his own cross. He was not proud of crosses, 



42 THE GLOEY OF THE CROSS 

of petty trials, of daily vexations. It was the cross 
of Christ that held him. It was that cross on the 
lonely hilltop where hung One Who being God be- 
came man, Who though rich became poor, Who 
took the great world up into His heart, Who hav- 
ing lived the sweetest, fairest life, died the saddest 
and most shameful death just to help people, to 
comfort them and save them from despair. 

Paul says: " This is the thing in which I glory, 
and God forbid that I should glory in anything 
else ! " I think he had his wits about him. We 
can afford to be enthusiastic over the cross. If 
there is anything glorious, it is the cross. If there 
is anything worth living for and giving to and dy- 
ing for, it is the cross. If there is aught to which 
we may proclaim allegiance without a blush, and 
to which we may anchor our eternal hopes without 
a fear, it is the cross. Glorious cross! "All the 
light of sacred story gathers round its head sub- 
lime!" 

Applause of the Cross 
The holy communion is the Church's solemn 
applause of the cross. In the sacrament of the 
Lord's Supper we commend the sacrificial heroism 
of the world's Redeemer. If we are sincere as we 
take the bread and wine, it is just a way we have 
of saying: " God forbid that I should glory save 
in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ ! " Save in 
the heroism and sacrifice of Him Who died to find 



THE GLOEY OF THE CEOSS 43 

me, Who gave His life to discover my lost soul 
amid the barren wilds ! Have we made the vow ? 
Are we praying, not for ease or success, but for a 
soul great enough to appreciate Calvary? The 
communion is a call to get away from the shop and 
mart and desk and tools and little time plans, and 
survey the wondrous cross on which the Saviour 
gave His life. As that cross casts its spell over us, 
" our richest gains we count but loss, and pour 
contempt on all our pride." 

Let us understand that glorying, to be genuine, 
must be more than a phrase. For one to say, " I 
glory," means far more than for him to say, " I 
approve; I am pleased; I am proud; I boast." It 
is comparatively easy to do that with Calvary. It 
is not hard to stand off and gaze at it and say fine 
things about it, and say it is wonderful, it is great 
and glorious. But that is not what Paul meant. 
He meant, " I am ready to be offered ; I yearn to 
experience the cross." Glory is a word for char- 
acter. When a man says: "God forbid that I 
should glory save in the cross," he is praying that 
the cross may become a personal experience. 

We are beginning now to see what he meant. 
He was dead in earnest. He was making a great 
vow that he could pay only with his life. Am I 
ready to make it, and in the same great way ? God 
forbid that I should seek a life of ease, of selfish- 
ness, of vain pleasures, of worldly fame and gaudy 
show! God forbid that I should draw back at 



44 THE GLOBY OF THE GROSS 

hardship, or protest at self-denial! There stands 
the cross. Let me experience it. Let me taste its 
passions. Let me be swayed by its power. Let 
me live it and prove its reality. 

It is not easy. It is easy to sing: " In the cross 
of Christ I glory," but to live that song is not easy. 
May God grant grace to live it! In the hallowed 
hush of a mystic communion with Him Who has 
made the hated cross the radiant symbol of the 
world's sublimest heroism and holiest sacrifice, 
may my halting lips try to make the prayer of the 
cross ! " God forbid that I should glory save in 
the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ ! " 



VI 

THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should 
die."— John 12:32,33. 

ONE of the loveliest girls of the city died in 
the morning of life. She had all the 
world could give to make life happy, and 
she had what the world could not give nor take 
away. The most precious thing she left, though, 
was a little note-book in which from time to time 
she had written down the things which had made 
the strongest appeal to her deepest nature. In 
conducting the funeral, I read some quotations 
from this little book. They revealed the girl's in- 
ner life. They lifted the veil from her soul. They 
proclaimed her ideals. The very last line she had 
written was this: "The power of the cross is the 
greatest power on earth." There is no profounder 
truth. 

This was Christ's own estimate of the cross. 
Jesus did not shun the cross. He sought it. He 
felt that He could never succeed without it. He 
might teach and preach and heal, but if He was to 
save, He must reach the cross. This is what He 
meant by being lifted up from the earth. He is 

45 



46 THE POWEE OP THE CKOSS 

speaking of His crucifixion. He is saying: " My 
goal is Calvary. My crown is a chaplet of thorns. 
My throne is a cross." 

He felt the same way about His disciples. He 
saw no future for them apart from the cross. If 
they were to save the world, they must travel to 
Calvary and wear the thorns, too. If they were 
to overcome the world, they must manage some- 
how to get themselves crucified. And so He said 
to them: " If any man will come after me, let him 
deny himself, and take up his cross and follow 
me. 

The world is coming to see it as Christ saw it. 
Three hundred years had not gone by before the 
Roman Emperor saw it, and tearing down the 
eagle, he let fly the cross, declaring: " In this sign 
we conquer! " To-day the symbolism of the cross 
is written over all the struggles men are making 
for a better world. It is our emblem of hope. It 
is our badge of immortality. It is our decoration 
of honour. It marks the road to glory and to God. 
Yes, the power of the cross is the greatest power 
on earth. Those who ignore the cross miss the 
best. Those who deny it are doomed to defeat. 
Those who despise it are lost already. 

What is the power of the cross ? 

Surrender 

It is the power of surrender. Follow Christ 
into the garden on the night of the betrayal. 



THE POWEE OP THE CBOSS 47 

Watch Him as He wins His great victory. The 
conflict is sore. The sweat is, as it were, great 
drops of blood pouring to the ground. But as He 
says: " Not my will, but thine, be done," the tri- 
umph is complete and the adversary is vanquished. 
There is power in surrender, in what you give 
up, in being big enough to determine not to have 
your own way. There is power not in resistance, 
but in dependence; not in striking back, but in 
yielding; not in crushing, but in clinging. This 
was the discovery Jacob made as he wrestled that 
fateful night with the angel at the brook. The 
power of victory came to him when ceasing to con- 
tend, he began to cling. 



Suffering 

It is the power of suffering. Calvary is a story 
of suffering. Christ's sufferings were real. He 
was not an actor. His agonies were more than 
physical. Calvary was the agony of a great soul 
making propitiation. Its loneliness was the soli- 
tude of a mighty spirit breaking away out of the 
night's darkness for others. It was the loneliness 
of the great-hearted Christ, crying: " My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me? " 

There is power in what you suffer. We think 
of suffering as a sign of weakness. Christ thought 
of it as an evidence of power. It is the price that 
must be paid for life. Every mother pays this 



48 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

price for the baby that cries in her arms. Christ, 
Who took the world on His heart as He hung on 
the cross, was paying this price, for it says: " He 
shall see of the travail of his soul." The power of 
the cross is the power of suffering, of those who 
have gone up through great tribulation, and 
washed their robes and made them white in the 
blood of the Lamb. It is only the souls that trav- 
ail that possess the power which is to bring in the 
new day. 

Sacrifice 

It is the power of sacrifice. Christ put Himself 
aside. He possessed all the powers of Godhood, 
and used them for others, but never for Himself. 
He could make bread with words, but He never 
turned a stone to bread to satisfy His own hunger. 
He could raise the dead. But He never lifted a 
finger to staunch His own wounds. One of the 
sublimest things ever written of Him is this: 
" Who, being in the form of God, thought it not 
robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of 
no reputation, and took upon him the form of a 
servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and 
being found in fashion as a man, he humbled 
himself and became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the cross. Wherefore God hath also 
highly exalted him." 

There is power in sacrifice, in what you give up 
rather than what you claim, in what you lose rather 



THE POWEE OP THE CEOSS 49 

than in what you gain, in doing your duty rather 
than in claiming your rights, in stepping down 
rather than in pushing up. So the marching order 
for the kingdom takes us to the cross. If you 
want power, you must let go. 

Service 

It is the power of service. Christ did not suffer 
just to be suffering. His agony was not spectacu- 
lar. Calvary was not an exhibition. It was an 
experience. It was not sacrifice to achieve merit, 
but to provide redemption. He suffered to keep 
others from suffering. He sacrificed that others 
might not be condemned. He died that the con- 
demned might be forgiven. The cross is the sym- 
bol not of penance, but of service. Jesus hung on 
the cross that one who is in a far country might 
find the way back to the Father's house. In the 
very act of expiation, Jesus, forgetting Himself, 
lifts nail-pierced hands to open the door for a peni- 
tent thief to pass into Paradise. 

There is power in service, in what you do for 
others. He is greatest who is a servant. " I am 
among you as one that serveth." This is the way 
a God talks, and those who are made on such a 
measure are the heroes men to-day adore. 

Love 
It is the power of love. Love is the greatest 



50 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

thing in the world. Love seems weakest, but is 
strongest. God is love. The resistless power of 
the cross is the matchless winsomeness of love. 
Christ loves us into goodness. This is the secret 
of becoming Godlike. 

If you want power, you must love. The power 
of hate is the power to hurt, to destroy, to damn. 
Such power is doomed. The power love has is the 
power to help, to reclaim, to redeem. Such power 
is immortal. The power of hate is the power of 
the wind. The power of love is the power of the 
sun. The wind destroys and exhausts itself. The 
sun warms and comforts and brings life to the 
world. 

Death 

It is the power of dying. The power of the 
cross is not the power of being dead, but of dying. 
Christ died and is alive forevermore. There is no 
death to the Christian, and yet there is no escape 
from dying. Christ's death on the cross was not 
the cessation of physical functions. It was the ex- 
perience of His great soul in expiation. It was 
something like this that Paul had in mind when he 
said: " I die daily." 

There is power in dying daily. There is power 
in living the cross, in climbing on the stepping- 
stones of your dead self to higher things. It is on 
the stones of surrender and suffering and sacrifice 
and service and love that the soul climbs to power. 



THE POWEE OF THE CEOSS 61 

w For thus looking within and around 
Do we ever renew 
With that stoop of the soul 
Which in bending upraises it, too, 
The submission of man's nothing perfect 
To God's all complete, 
As by each new obeisance of spirit 
We climb to His feet." 

These are some of the elements of power in the 
cross. There is no greater power on earth nor in 
heaven. No wonder over the graves of the sol- 
diers love plants a cross. It is more than a symbol 
of death or an emblem of hope. It is a sign of 
power. It is a way of saying that the soldiers who 
fought and died that the world might be free have 
not suffered defeat. The long rows of white 
crosses make their mute appeal to mankind, and 
are themselves clothed with a power that is in- 
vincible. In those fields of crosses there is more 
power than in all palaces and arsenals. There is 
the hillcrest from which, like Calvary, a great sac- 
rifice looks down with a summons that cannot be 
resisted. It is a kind of prophecy that the cross 
will yet break down the walls of hate, and draw 
men into the fraternity of good will. For "greater 
love hath no man than this." 

It is to keep all this forever in mind that the 
Holy Supper was instituted. It is the sacrament 
of the cross. It is a picture story of the greatest 
power on earth. As we partake of the sacred em- 



52 THE POWEK OF THE CROSS 

blems of Christ's passion, let us salute the cross. 
Let us hail its mighty power. Let us surrender to 
its holy influence. "And I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth, will draw all men unto me. This He 
said signifying what death He should die." 

" When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of glory died, 
My richest gains I count but loss, 
And pour contempt on all my pride." 



VII 
CROSS-BEARING 

"They found a man of Cyrene, Si?non by name. Him they 
compelled to bear his cross." — Matthew 27:32. 



c 



HRIST is on His way to Calvary. He is 
going out to Calvary to be crucified, to 
have the nails driven through His hands 
and feet, to have an ugly gash torn in His side by 
a Roman spear-head, to wear a crown of thorns, 
and to hang on a cruel cross until death comes to 
lower the curtain on His pain. He has had a hard 
night. He has had no sleep. He came straight 
from the agony in Gethsemane to His trial, which 
lasted through the remaining hours of that awful 
night, and when day came, it brought only the 
rough abuse of crafty foes and the jeers and insults 
of a heartless mob. Worn, haggard, spent, loaded 
down with the cross on which He is to die, Jesus 
staggers out toward Calvary. He stumbles and 
falls from sheer weakness. They drag Him to 
His feet, but He stumbles again, and again He 
falls. He cannot rise now. His strength is gone. 
There He lies with the curious crowd looking on. 
It was a sight to make the angels of heaven weep. 
It all happened at the gate as they were going 
out There thev met a man who was coming in. 

53 



54 CEOSS-BEAEING 

He had been out in the country, and he was coming 
into the city. I like to think that he had no hand 
in that wild night of infamy and hate, that his 
voice was not mingled with the cries of those who 
shouted: " Crucify Him! " and that his soul was 
not stained with innocent blood. His name was 
Simon. He was from Cyrene, in Northern Africa. 
Whether a visitor at the feast or a member of the 
Cyrenean colony dwelling in Jerusalem, we do not 
know; but he was coming in as the death guard 
was going out. And they lift the cross from the 
fallen Christ, and lay it on the strong shoulders of 
the man of Cyrene. 

And now they are going on toward Calvary. 
Christ is on His feet again, and the man who car- 
ries His cross walks beside Him. There they go 
together, Christ and His cross-bearer, the Saviour 
Who directly will be nailed to His death on the 
cross and from Whose dying lips will sound the 
loneliest sob that ever broke the silence of despair, 
and beside Him the man whose strong shoulders 
have taken from His broken and spent body its 
weary load. 

I wonder what passed between those two as 
they went out to Calvary. I am not curious to 
know what the soldiers said, nor am I interested 
in that shoddy rabble that dogged His steps; but 
I am interested in the man who carried His cross. 
Perhaps Jesus did not speak. He was too weak 
for words. But I think there must have been a 



CEOSS-BEAEING 55 

moment when their eyes met, and Jesus gave His 
cross-bearer a look the beauty and glory of which 
Simon carried with him to his dying day. And I 
like to think that Simon said something to Jesus 
as they went on together, — just a word to hearten 
the worn sufferer, to cheer and comfort the weary 
spirit of the tired Christ. 

With this old story before us, I want us to make 
our communion meditation the subject of cross- 
bearing, for whoever walks with Christ must carry 
a cross. That is what it means to be a Christian. 
Some think only of escape and exemption. We 
would be saved not for what we can do, but for 
what we can get. We are thinking of the crown, 
of heavenly rest. But the cross comes first. Jesus 
made this plain when He said: " If any man will 
come after me, let him deny himself, and take up 
his cross and follow me." In this story of Simon 
we discover what is involved in cross-bearing. 

Horror 

There was the horror of the cross. It is not 
there to-day. The cross has become a decoration 
to be worn by dainty women and soft men. Silver- 
smiths work it into wonderful designs and set it 
with rich jewels and make it into a god. The 
cross features music, and embellishes architecture, 
and adorns art. Its horror is gone. 

It was not so in the day Simon carried Christ's 
cross. All the infamy of the gallows was there. 



56 CKOSS-BEAEING 

It was the last word of disgrace for the condemned 
It stood for all that was loathsome and repulsive. 
It was the form in which the extremest penalty 
was meted out to criminals of the lowest and vilest 
kind. It was not possible for Simon to escape a 
feeling of horror as he found himself branded with 
the stigma of the cross. 

In a way, this element of horror abides for us if 
we really understand what cross-bearing for 
Christ involves. His cross is not that picture in 
the stained glass of the church window. It is not 
the symbol that is placed at the top of the church 
spire. It is the sacrifice which cuts to the quick 
in the soul. Sometimes it involves the surrender 
of what is dearest in life. As we face our Golgotha 
and learn the price that must be paid, something of 
the horror of the cross still stages itself in our 
experience. 

Unexpectedness 

There was the unexpectedness of the cross. 
Simon walked into his Calvary. There was no 
announcement. It took him by surprise. He was 
not even a member of the parade, not even a sight- 
seer. He was going the other way. There was 
every reason why he should be the last to be 
chosen. But all at once, he finds himself singled 
out and loaded down with the cross. 

Usually it comes as a surprise. The bolt falls 
from the blue. Suffering and pain do not wait to 



CKOSS-BEABLNG 57 

be announced. They enter without introduction. 
We never know what to-morrow holds. The cross 
never heralds its approach. In this, our cross 
differs from Christ's. His was expected. Its 
shadow was always on His path. He steadfastly 
set His face to go to Jerusalem. But God merci- 
fully spares us this anticipation. It is enough to 
know that when the cross comes, strength will be 
given to bear the load. 

Compulsion 

There was the compulsion of the cross. " Him 
they compelled to bear his cross." It reads as if 
Simon protested. What had he ever done to be 
thus stigmatized? He was attending to his own 
business. He is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen. 
He has had nothing to do with the trial. They 
have selected the wrong man; if they must have a 
cross-bearer, let them take one of those hoarse- 
throated ruffians who have hounded Him to trial 
and who were so keen for His conviction. But 
they declined to listen to protest, and Simon is 
compelled. 

There is a compulsion in cross-bearing. You 
have wondered why the load should have been laid 
on you. What have you done to deserve it? It 
does not seem fair. You make your protest. But 
it is all a waste of words. Back of the cross is a 
great mystery. Christ did not deserve Calvary, but 
there was no way for Him to escape. Perhaps 



58 CEOSS-BEAEING 

some day the curtain will lift, and there will be an 
explanation, but now the cross compels. It were 
easier not to murmur. It were better cheerfully to 
take the cross and follow Him. 

Severity 

There was the severity of the cross. Cross- 
bearing is not easy. It is hard. The cross is 
heavy. It crushed Christ. Simon was worn before 
he laid his burden down where Jesus was to die and 
where all burdens slip from tired shoulders, and 
the weary find rest. But there is a severity, a hard- 
ness, a sternness about crosses. Sacrifice wears a 
commandment face as it summons us to duty. 

And yet this is the glory of the cross. This 
constitutes its heroism. Christianity is not a cheap 
religion. It challenges the best there is in the soul. 
It calls for hearts that are courageous. It does not 
offer ease and the pleasures of a soft life, but it 
speaks of the storm, and sternly calls to hardship 
and trial. But these things which I have men- 
tioned are not all. There is another side to cross- 
bearing. 

Fellowship 

There was the fellowship of the cross. It was 
Simon's chance to walk with Christ. He walked 
out of obscurity into fame bearing the cross. But 
for this, we should probably never have heard of 
him. This was his introduction to Jesus. And 
what an intimate fellowship followed! The very 



CEOSS-BEAEING 59 

beam that had pressed down into Christ's flesh now 
presses into the flesh of Simon. A while ago the 
load was on Christ. It is now His cross-bearer's. 
What a bond! Who would shrink from such a 
sweet load ? Welcome the burden that is a bond of 
fellowship with Christ ! 

Who knows but the fellowship of that hour 
made Simon a Christian? He has reached home, 
and is telling his wife the story. He seems to say: 
"Wife, I have had a wonderful time to-day. I 
met a man unlike any I have ever known before. 
They were taking Him out to crucify Him. And 
they made me bear His cross. But He was no 
criminal. He was the gentlest, purest, most 
heavenly Man I have ever met. He was more like 
God. I believe in Him." And after a while, I 
fancy his wife said: " I believe in Him, too." And 
so they took the Hero of Calvary into their hearts. 
They had two sons, Alexander and Rufus. The 
years drift by. They seem to be living in Rome 
now. One day they have a preacher in their home. 
They learn to love him, and he counts them as his 
dear friends. And as he closes his letter to the 
Romans, Paul says: "Salute Rufus, that choice 
Christian, and his mother, who has also been a 
mother to me." 

Oh, the fellowship of the cross ! This is the way 
we find Him, — in the fellowship of His sufferings; 
and as we share our sufferings with Him, we are 
not depressed. We are glorified. 



60 CKOSS-BEAKING 

Memory 

There was the memory of the cross. Some days 
Simon forgot. There were weeks and months that 
were a blank in his life. But he never forgot the 
day he carried Christ's cross. It stood out, radi- 
ant among all the days of his life. It stamped it- 
self forever on his memory. He loved to think 
about it, to seek a quiet spot now and then and 
recall that great hour when he walked with Christ 
and bore His cross. It is the cross that glorifies 
memory, and it is memory that transfigures the 
cross. There is pain at the time, but somehow as 
time goes on, the pain fades out, and only the 
glory remains. Thus the days we cherish are the 
days when we suffered with Him. The deeds we 
prize are the sacrifices we were permitted to make 
for Him. It is so here. It must be the same in 
heaven. Hence, one has nothing worth remember- 
ing if he has carried no cross for Christ. 

Triumph 

There was the triumph of the cross. Three days 
had not gone by ere it showed itself. Christ is 
risen. The flame of the holy evangel begins to 
spread. By the thousands they are acclaiming the 
crucified One as Lord and King. As Simon hears 
of all this, he becomes increasingly proud of the 
day he bore Christ's cross. This is his distinction 
in the early church. When they introduced him 



CEOSS BEAEING §L 



to new disciples, this was the thing they said about 
him: " This is the Simon who carried His cross." 
It was distinction enough. 

The cross is increasingly triumphant. Ours is 
not a lost cause. 

" Jesus shall reign where'er the sun 
Does his successive journeys run." 

The cross is not our despair. It is our hope. It 
is not weight, but wings. It is not penalty, but re- 
ward. All hail the cross ! " They found a man 
of Cyrene. Him they compelled to bear his 
cross." Are they laying a cross from Christ's 
shoulders on you? Do not shrink or turn away. 
Rather rejoice. For if we suffer, we shall also 
reign with Him. 



VIII 
PEACE! PERFECT PEACE! 

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not 
as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be 
troubled, neither let it be afraid." — John 14 : 27. 

THIS was Christ's bequest to His disciples 
at the communion table. They are 
gathered in the upper room. Soon they 
will go to the garden. From the garden, Christ 
will go to the cross, from Gethsemane to Calvary. 
Yonder is the great shadow approaching nearer 
and closer, and soon it will shroud that little group 
of friends in its sable gloom. 

Jesus has just instituted the Holy Supper. He 
is asking His friends to do a thing that will keep 
them from forgetting Him. He does not want to 
be forgotten, and so He takes the bread and blesses 
it, and says: " Take, eat, this is my body which is 
for you; this do in remembrance of me." After 
the same manner He takes the cup, and says: 
" This is the new testament in my blood ; all of you 
drink of it; for as often as you eat this bread and 
drink this cup, you do show my death until I 



come." 



62 



PEACE ! PEEFECT PEACE ! 63 

He would also give them something as He leaves 
them. There at the communion table He makes 
a bequest. He devises His estate to His friends. 
What legacy can He leave them ? What has Jesus 
to bequeath ? He has plenty of trouble. Shall He 
leave them that? He has plenty of sorrow, of 
persecution and privation, of want and woe and 
hardship, of desertion and apparent defeat. He 
has all this in abundance, and indeed, His friends 
will speedily come into possession of all this. In 
a few hours they will be fleeing for their lives, 
driven hither and thither, hunted down, in prison, 
slain. Christ could easily have said: " My trouble 
I leave with you; my trouble I give unto you," 
and the world would never have tried to break His 
will. 

His bequest, however, was of a very different 
kind. Let us listen to Him as He devises His 
estate : " Peace I leave with you, my peace I give 
unto you : not as the world giveth, give I unto you. 
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be 
afraid." Christ's legacy to His friends was peace, 
perfect peace. It was the one thing the world was 
ever trying to take away from Him, but the one 
thing of which He was in fullest and completest 
possession when He came to die. 

And those men to whom Christ thus devised His 
blessed peace never for a moment doubted the 
reality of the bequest. In the years which followed 
they had trouble, but they also had peace. The^ 



64 PEACE ! PEBFECT PEACE ! 

had privations without end, and perils that were 
ceaseless, but they were ever garrisoned with the 
peace of God which passeth all understanding. 

What the World Needs 

It is the legacy we need most. Existence is 
crowded with restlessness and distraction. Life is 
packed with unrest. There is turmoil and con- 
fusion on every side. There is strife and aliena- 
tion. The storm is on the sea of life. The waves 
are angry. Oh, for rest! For quiet! For escape 
from friction and worry! For the Master to 
stand forth as in the olden times and say to the 
angry sea: " Peace ! Be still ! " 

Peace is what the world is needing most in these 
days in which we live. The prayer for peace 
beats day and night in a tide of ceaseless inter- 
cession against the throne of God. It moans across 
the dying lips of soldiers on the battle-field. It 
cries out of the hearts of women who have lost 
their loved ones, and from the stricken faces of 
children whom the cruel war has orphaned. It 
shrieks in the scream of bursting shells, and groans 
in the sullen roar of guns. It pleads with heaven 
in a dumb pathos from scarred and ruined fields, 
from valleys once lovely, but now desolate, from 
forests mowed down by shot to bleeding and un- 
sightly stumps. Oh, for peace! For surcease of 
strife ! For an end to war and bloodshed ! For a 
bit of the communion bequest of the world's best 



PEACE ! PEKFECT PEACE ! 65 

Friend in these days of the world's greatest trour 
ble! 

And peace is possible. It is the one thing that 
is permanent. Strife has only a temporary tenure. 
Trouble is like a cloud that cannot last. It is like 
a shadow that must pass. But peace is the eternal 
blue in God's sky which clouds may dim, but not 
destroy. Peace is the star whose shining light all 
nights cannot quench, for peace is down on God's 
program for our world, and He Who is to reign 
forever and ever has said: "Peace I leave with 
you!" 

Christ's Peace 

What is the peace of Christ? It is vastly more 
than escape and exemption. It is more than hav- 
ing the ache deadened and the trouble put to sleep. 
Christ's peace is not negative, but positive. It is 
acquired not by running away from turmoil, but 
by conquering it. It is not a rotten peace. It is 
the peace of victory, the serenity of a great con- 
quest. 

It is peace amid the storm. You have seen a 
bird perch on the mast of a ship that was tossed 
by wild waves ; but the bird was not afraid. It is 
a peace like that. You have seen a star gleam on 
the edge of a tempest, but the star was undisturbed. 
It is a peace like that. You have seen the sun 
shine on a scene that was all confusion and wreck, 
but the glory of the sunshine was unstained. It is 



66 PEACE ! PEEFECT PEACE ! 

a peace like that. It is the kind of peace Christ 
had. Never was there such opposition. The tu- 
mult was ever about Him. But He moved on, 
calm, serene, and undisturbed, for He had a peace 
the world could not give nor take away. It is the 
peace of an inward content, of a spiritual joy, of a 
soul serenity. The dwelling place of happiness is 
in the heart. The heart draws its nourishment 
from an unseen source. I have seen a tree grow- 
ing on the naked cheek of a bare and barren rock 
on a mountainside. Through storm and sunshine 
it stands up undisturbed from its barren base, lift- 
ing verdant branches which cast a generous shade. 
I wondered how it lived on such a sterile site, until 
I discovered hidden roots which lapped around the 
rock and ran away to rich and mellow soil, and 
from that hidden oasis by secret lines the tree 
drew its sustenance. It is so in the life of the soul. 
Ever and again our lot is bare and barren, but 
faith connects with hidden resources, and we are 
sustained. 

" Outward life is light and shadow, 
Mingled wrong and struggling right, 
But within the outward trouble 
Shines a healing, inward light. 

" Not to us may come fulfilment, 
Not below our struggles cease, 
Yet the heavenly vision gives us, 
Even here, an inward peace." 



PEACE! PEKFECT PEACE! 67 

Christ's peace is that which comes from the 
great reconciliation. We are reconciled to God by 
the death of His Son. There is no peace until the 
soul has peace with God. There is no harmony 
for anything in the universe until it centres right. 
Man's soul centres in his Maker. Therefore let us 
have peace with God through our Lord Jesus 
Christ. Christ establishes peace between us and our 
eternal Father, and once that peace is ours, all 
worries and distractions lose their power to dis- 
turb us. 

Claim the Bequest 

Jesus is still at His table. He is breaking the 
communion bread. He presses the chalice of His 
sufferings to the lips of His disciples. He is say- 
ing over the old words, and among them is this: 
" Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto 
you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let 
not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 

Shall we claim our inheritance? Peace is ours 
if we will but have it. He has left it to us. The 
papers tell of a woman who has just come into 
possession of a fortune. A relative died years ago, 
leaving a large estate, and she was next of kin. 
During these years the newspapers had been ad- 
vertising for her. They had been searching the 
land trying to find her. But she had moved to an 
obscure town and changed her name. She was 
living in obscure poverty while all the time a for- 



68 PEACE ! PERFECT PEACE ! 

tune was hers if she would but claim it. Her 
identity was at last discovered almost by accident 
When will the Christian claim his estate, his peer- 
less possession of peace ? How God must hunt us 
out and run us down to give it to us! How He 
must plead with us to take Christ's communion 
bequest ! Why not take it and be happy ? 

" Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin : 
The blood of Jesus whispers peace within. 

" Peace, perfect peace, by thronging duties pressed: 
To do the will of Jesus, — this is rest. 

" Peace, perfect peace, with sorrows surging round : 
On Jesus' bosom naught but calm is found. 

" Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away : 
In Jesus' keeping we are safe, and they. 

" Peace, perfect peace, our future all unknown : 
Jesus we know, and He is on the throne. 

" Peace, perfect peace, death shadowing us and ours: 
Jesus has vanquished death and all its powers. 

" It is enough ; earth's struggles soon shall cease, 
And Jesus call us to Heaven's perfect peace," 



IX 
THE UNION OF COMMUNION 

" This is my commandment, That ye love one another as 1 
have loved you" — John 15 : 12. 

HERE is a sentence from the Saviour's 
communion address. He is giving His 
disciples His commandment. He is not 
repealing His Father's commandments. He is not 
suggesting that His Father spoke amiss when, 
amid the gleam and roar of Sinai, He thundered 
out upon the race the ten great moralities on whose 
enduring strength the future structure of human 
society was to be built. He is saying that in ad- 
dition to these ten words, and in perfect harmony 
with diem, and indeed, as a result of them, He has 
a law to give. It is this : " That ye love one an- 
other as I have loved you." 

It is a great commandment. Love is the great- 
est thing in the world, and Christ's love was the 
greatest love in the world, and we Christians are to 
love each other as Christ has loved us. There is 
nothing higher, holier, diviner than this. It is the 
tie which is to reunite the dismembered human 
race. It is the bond which is to bind us into a new 

69 



70 THE UNION OF COMMUNION 

unity. It is the constitution on which is to be or- 
ganized the kingdom of fraternity. All these are 
there. Every possible duty is packed into a single 
line. " Love one another as I have loved you." 
Let us do that, and nothing remains undone. Let 
us do everything else, and fail to do that, and life 
remains woefully incomplete, and duty tumbles 
down into ruins. 

In this commandment Christ foregleams a two- 
fold union. The first is that between Him and His 

I disciples. The second is that between His dis- 
ciples and one another. There is first the tie which 
binds us to Christ, so that Christ and His people 
are one. Then there is the tie which binds us to 
each other, so that Christ's people are one. In 
each case the tie is love. Christ's people are one 
with Him because He has loved down and out of 
existence every dividing barrier. Christ's people 
are one with each other because they love each 
other as Christ loved them. 

This is the union of communion. Declaring it, 
Christ instituted the Holy Supper to keep it an 
everlasting sacramental remembrance, so that as 
often as His followers should meet and break 
bread among themselves, as often as they should 
pass the cup, they should symbolize their oneness 

\ with Him and their oneness with one another. It 
is this unity Christ would have His people medi- 
tate upon and experience as they partake of the 
sacred emblems in remembrance of Him. 



THE UNION OF COMMUNION 71 

One With Christ 

We are one with the Saviour. His love for us 
is such an absorbing and compelling passion that 
it makes us as much a part of Him as our bodies 
are a part of us. 

We are one with Christ, so that if He has any 
merit, it is as much ours as His. He has all merit. 
His is the merit of a perfect righteousness, the 
saintliness that can never come into condemna- 
tion. Since we are one with Christ, Chrises merit 
is ours. 

We are one with Christ, so that if He has any 
standing with God, it is as much ours as His. He* 
has standing with God. He has entered into the 
" holy of holies." He is our all-prevailing advo- 
cate, so that whatever He asks of the Father is 
done. Our prayers are as prevailing. Marvellous 
privilege! This is what Christ means when He 
says: " If ye abide in me, and my words abide in | 
you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done i 
unto you." 

We are one with Christ, so that if He has any 
fortune, it is as much ours as His. All things are 
His. He is the heir of God, and because we are 
one with Him, we are joint heirs to an inheritance 
incorruptible, undefined, and that shall never pass 
away. All that Christ has of honour, of dignity 
and power, of spiritual resources, is as much ours 
as His ; not because we have earned it, not because 
we need it ; but because He has loved us. 



72 THE UNION OF COMMUNION 

We are one with Christ, so that if He has any 
future, it is as much ours as His. All the future is 
in His keeping. He is the King of the destiny of 
the world. " Of the increase of his government 
and peace there shall be no end." The destiny of 
His people is the same. No wonder we are told 
that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man, the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love 
him." 

This is wonderful. But it is not all. The re- 
verse side of privilege is always obligation. Union 
is two-sided. Not only is Christ united to us, but 
I we to Him. Consider what this involves. If we 
have any merit, it is as much His as ours. If we 
have any standing, any fortune, any future, any 
influence, any asset of value whatever, it is ever 
as much His as ours. We are soldiers of fortune 
together. We are not our own, for we have been 
* bought with a price. We have been purchased by 
a great love. For this we are to glorify God in 
our bodies and in our spirits, which are His. 

This is the first kind of union the communion 
proclaims. Why should we be timid and fearful 
if this be true ? Why should we be alarmed as we 
gaze out into the vast rushing worlds amid which 
we seem adrift like a mote afloat in a sunbeam? 
We are not lost. We are part of Christ, and all is 
well. 



THE UNION OF COMMUNION 73 

One With One Another 

We are also to love down and out of existence 
all the barriers which separate Christ's people from 
one another. We are one with one another, so 
that if any one of us has any merit, it is as much 
his fellow-Christian's as his own. We are on a I 
level as regards our rights. We must not think of 
ourselves more highly than we ought to think. 
Each must esteem the other better than himself. t 

We are one with one another, so that if any one * 
has a load to carry, it is as much his fellow-Chris- 
tian's load as his own. We are to bear one an- 
other's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. 
One love has made identical all our life interests. 

We are one with one another, so that if any one 
is in peril, in jeopardy or need, either temporal * 
or eternal, it is as much his fellow-Christian's as 
his own. We are to follow Christ along the road 
marked by a cross. "As he laid down his life 
for us, so must we lay down our lives for the 
brethren." We are one in our hopes and aims, our 
faiths and loves, our duties and obligations. 

Is not this also wonderful? We are brethren. 
We are not foes, competitors, strangers, chance 
acquaintances, companions. We are more than or- / 
dinary comrades. " All we be brethren." " Our • 
hopes, our fears, our aims are one." 

This is what Christ wants His people to be to 
each other. Is He expecting too much ? It would 



74 THE UNION OF COMMUNION 

be a heavenly thing for us to dwell together this 
way, and act toward each other in accordance with 

\ such holy bonds. But is it possible ? We live in a 
practical world. The atmosphere we breathe is 
saturated with strife and slander and suspicion and 
sin. Can it be that such fellowship was ever meant 
for earth ? 

It is asking much. The union of communion is 
not an ordinary union. It is not a common tie nor 
a cheap fellowship. It is high as God, holy as Cal- 

x vary, enduring as eternity. But we do not regard 
it as too high when it comes to our union with 
Christ, or too heavenly when it comes to claiming 
His merit and standing before God. We feel that 
our union with Christ is possible because His love 
for us is so great. If we loved each other as He 
loves us, it would not be too wild a dream to hope 
that we might realize here on earth this second 
kind of union. If we are His true followers, He 
commands us to love each other after that fash- 
ion, — " as he has loved us." 

If Christians would only keep this command- 
ment of love, it would not be necessary for us to 
be continually trying to invent some new panacea 
for the ills of the world. There is not much room 
for starlight when there is sunlight. Cheap 
schemes to bring about human brotherhood would 
fall of their own weight if men would only pay a 
little attention to Christ's scheme. The union of 
communion is Christ's dream for humanity. It is 



THE UNION OF COMMUNION 75 

Christianity's gospel for social redemption. It is 
so much better than all others that they cannot 
even be compared. " This is my commandment, 
That ye love one another as I have loved you." 
The world is still far, far behind Christ. People 
sometimes talk about Christianity being worn out. 
They speak of its failure. It would be well first to 
give it a trial. 

Christ proposes to light the torch of human 
progress with the flame of His own holy passion, 
and teach men to love each other in the same 
heavenly way that He loves all men. Oh, to learn 
that lesson! It is the old lesson, the great, high, 
divine lesson of being brethren. It is about all 
there is in religion. As we partake of the sacra- 
mental symbols, as the old story fills our hearts 
with its blessed peace, let us pray that we may com- 
prehend with all saints what is the length and 
breadth, and height and depth, and to know the 
love of God which passeth knowledge, — that we 
may love one another as Christ has loved us ! 



X 

THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE 
KINGDOM 

" Until that day when I drink it new with you in my 
Father's kingdom." — Matthew 26:29. 

THIS verse takes us to the communion in 
the upper room. Jesus is gathered 
around the table with His friends. 
Across the table falls the shadow of a cross, and 
into the hearts of those present comes a vague fear 
that soon their days of comradeship will be rudely 
broken. For three happy years they have gone up 
and down the land together, under the leadership 
of Jesus, sharing in the service and glory of a 
ministry that has changed woe to peace. But hos- 
tility has dogged their steps, and the night has 
come for the last act. Soon they must part. 

Ere they part, Jesus pledges them to remem- 
brance. He takes bread and wine and consecrates 
them as the symbols of His passion, and bids His 
disciples, when they meet, to partake of them in 
hallowed remembrance of Him. Then for the first 
time they keep the feast. Jesus keeps it with them. 
In future they will keep it, and down the centuries 
Christ's faithful followers will keep it when Christ 
Himself is present only in the remembrance of the 
hearts that love Him. But to-night Jesus is there 
in person, and thus they keep the feast. 

76 



THE SEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 77 

He is saying: " This is not the last time I will 
keep it with you. The day is coming when we shall 
meet around the table again. Until that day when 
I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.'' 
As He said that, the atmosphere of the upper room 
changed. It became an antechamber to the courts 
of glory. The little street outside was no longer a 
blind alley, ending in the shame of a malefactor's 
cross, but a royal avenue winding to a throne. 
Jesus will die, but He will live. He will push 
through the grave, and brush past shades, and 
shake oft the sepulchre. 

He will drink it new with them, with the morn- 
ing light in their faces, with no shadow across the 
table, with no fear in their hearts, and with noth- 
ing to stain or dim the event. 

He will drink it with them in the kingdom, not 
in defeat, but in victory ; not hunted by the foe, but 
serene: not under cover of darkness in an upper 
room, but on the heights of the free, and in the 
sunlit open; not with the hirelings of crafty- priests 
crouching outside the door to arrest, but with the 
songs of the invisible choir, and with the chant of 
the redeemed ; not with a rough cross yonder on an 
horizon of storm-clouds, but with the white throne, 
and the light that never fades, and the peace that 
never dies. 

This was the Saviour's promise to His friends 
there at the communion in the upper room. As 
they listened, they forgot their hardships. The 



78 THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 

cheap room became the palace of the King. Fear 
faded from their hearts. Peril seemed a thing of 
the past. The note changed from minor to major, 
and the song from miserere to jubilate. The trans- 
figuring light of immortal victory fell on their 
faces, and the fires of an enthusiasm that was never 
to be quenched flared into flame on the altar of 
their faith. 

" Until that day when I drink it new with you 
in my Fathers kingdom." What did Christ mean 
by this new communion in the kingdom ? Perhaps 
the usual interpretation is to refer the text to some 
experience the Christian is to have after death in 
heaven, and the thought is that after this life of 
suffering and sorrow, of struggle with temptation, 
after the turmoil of strife and the conflict of battle 
and the days of service are over, when there are no 
more furnace fires to scorch us, and no angry 
floods to sweep about us, we shall meet. And 
Jesus will meet with us, and for the sake of old 
times we shall keep the feast. Just as the old 
soldiers to-day gather around their camp-fires, and 
tell the stories of a war long past, so the veterans 
of the cross will gather with the Captain of their 
salvation, and with love of auld lang syne in their 
hearts, they will keep the feast. 

I imagine that the substance of this interpre- 
tation is true, whether the drapery we paint into it 
be true or not. Beyond the stretches of toil, there 
is rest. Beyond the battle-fields, there is victory. 



THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 79 

Beyond the hills of struggle, there are the heights 
of peace. After the long march is home. There 
in the glory, with victory on our banners, we shall 
meet and greet each other, and our Divine Leader 
will appear, and " we shall see Him face to face, 
and tell the story, saved by grace." 

Let us think of this heavenly communion. Are 
we cast down and discouraged, fiercely tempted 
and sorely tried? Are we weary and well-nigh 
spent ? Let us dwell on the hour when all this will 
be behind us. Now we drink the cup in weakness, 
but some day we shall drink it with frailty all 
gone ; now in sorrow, but some day with the tears 
wiped away; now with Satan dogging our steps, 
but some day with Satan in chains forever; now 
with the sound of battle, but some day with cheers 
of triumph, and the faces of home, and the songs 
of everlasting peace. 

And yet I wonder, after all, if this is precisely 
what Jesus meant when He said : " Until that day 
when I drink it new with you in my Father's king- 
dom." If so, of course the heavenly communion 
will be one, not so much of remembrance, as of 
reunion. Perhaps as we think of this communion 
in heaven, it seems shadowy and far-off. Is there 
not a nearer and more tangible communion that 
Christ had in mind? I think there is, for Jesus' 
ministry concerned itself not so much with mak- 
ing dead people happy as with making living people 
God's children. 



80 THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 

Jesus came to establish His kingdom in this 
world, to bring about changes in human society, to 
lead men to treat each other right. He speaks of 
this over and over again. It is a kingdom of 
righteousness and peace and joy, whose one law is 
the largess of love. It is a kingdom of peace, when 
war drums throb no longer, and battle flags are 
furled, when all men shall be brothers, when the 
Son of Man will no longer be a lonely figure, but 
every life will project itself along the lines of His 
character and ministry. 

Such a state of society seems a long way off, but 
it is nearer than it was, and nearer because Jesus 
has been living in this world for nineteen hundred 
years. The kingdom is coming. Governments are 
changing from despotism to republics. War is 
yielding to international arbitration. The stand- 
ards of trade are more ethical. Human life is 
held in higher esteem. Womanhood and child- 
hood are invested with an added sanctity. Delin- 
quents are treated, not so much as criminals, but 
rather as the victims of vicious influences for 
which they are not always responsible. For two 
thousands years we have been praying: " Thy 
kingdom come," and 

" It's coming yet, for a* that, 
When man to man the warl' o'er 
Shall brithers be, 
And a' that." 



THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 8* 

This is the meaning of world missions. It is a 
way Christianity has of saying that our brothers 
and sisters in Africa and China must share in the 
blessings of the kingdom. 

When the kingdom has come, when fraternity 
is established, when mankind are brothers, when 
brotherhood is no longer a dream but a world- 
reality, Christ says He will " drink the cup new." 
As we gather in that fraternity, as we meet in the 
fellowship and glory of perfect brotherhood, we 
shall discoyer as we look around the table and gaze 
into each other's faces, that Christ is with us. 

There is an old legend that once the Great Spirit 
visited the Indians whose home was in the foot- 
hills of the White Mountains, and that departing, 
he promised to visit them again. And that they 
might recognize him on his return, he fixed his 
image in the stone face of the mountain. It is 
said that one old Indian thought of the promise by 
day, dreamed of it by night, and looked often and 
anxiously into the faces of his brothers, to see 
whether he might distinguish the features of the 
Great Spirit. At last, when the nation had been 
purified by war, they looked into the face of this 
old prophet, and saw there the lineaments of the 
Great Spirit, who had come back and taken up his 
residence in the life of his devoted follower. 

It is something like this on a finer and grander 
and diviner scale which our God has done for us. 
He visited the race in the Person of the Son of 



82 THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 

Man, and departing, left with us the promise of 
His return; and through the centuries His faith- 
ful followers have been thinking of the promise by 
day, and dreaming of it by night, and ever and 
again voicing the prayer: u O Lord, tarry not, but 
come." 

Some day when the world has been purified by 
peace, when the kingdom has come, when frater- 
nity has been established, men shall look into each 
other's faces, and find there the image of their 
Lord, Who has come back and taken up His resi- 
dence in the lives of those who are possessed of 
His spirit. 

This is the new communion in the kingdom. It 
is toward this that the Gospel moves. This is the 
great consummation. For this the Christian is 
living. His motives are from on high. His citi- 
zenship is in the kingdom. He is saved by hope, 
and hope is beholding the vision of the kingdom, 
and living as though the kingdom were a reality. 

A generation ago, visitors from America in 
Florence were visiting the studio of Hiram Pow- 
ers, that gifted son of the Green Mountains, who in 
his fine work produced busts and statues and me- 
dallions which rivalled the Greek masters. In his 
rooms might be found the idealization of some of 
America's most famous statesmen and soldiers. 
There was the model of Liberty for the summit 
of the Capitol at Washington, of the California 
pioneer and the Massachusetts Puritan. 



THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 83 

One day a visitor from America said to Mr. 
Powers: " When were you in America last? " 
Smiling, he replied: "Some thirty years ago." 
" Then how is it that you manage to keep so well 
in touch with American life? " he was asked; and 
he answered: "I have never been out of touch 
with America itself. For thirty years I have eaten 
and slept in Italy, but I have never lived anywhere 
but in the United States." 

And so the Christian eats and sleeps in this age 
of strife and turmoil and conflict, but he is living 
in the kingdom. The motives of the kingdom 
drive his life; and some day, under the spell and 
service of the men and women who have caught a 
vision, the kingdom will be here, and the world 
will be ready for the new communion. What a 
communion that will be, when men shall hate each 
other no more, when 

" There is neither East nor West, 
Border nor breed nor birth," 

but all are one in Christ ! Christ will show Him- 
self among His friends again, and as He looks 
around the table, He will say: "At last I see of 
the travail of my soul, and am satisfied. The long 
waiting is over. My prayer is answered. All that 
the Father has given me have come to me. Grace 
has conquered and love has won." 

While Christ will be there, it will still be a feast 
of remembrance, for as we look back on the ages 



84 THE NEW COMMUNION IN THE KINGDOM 

of conflict, on the overthrow of hoary errors, on 
the fallen lifted and the sorrowing comforted and 
sickness healed, we shall see that Christ has 
brought it all about. His cross has won the vic- 
tory. His love has cast the spell that has changed 
the world. And as we lift the chalice of that new 
communion in the kingdom to our lips, every heart 
will adore Him, and the song of the feast will still 
be: 

" Bring forth the royal diadem, 
And crown Him Lord of all." 



XI 

THE NECESSITY OF THE 
RESURRECTION 

"And he began to teach them, that the Son of Man must 
suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the 
chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days 
rise again." — Mark 8 : 31. 

CHRIST declared that His resurrection was 
a necessity. We are in the habit of plac- 
ing it on a lower plane. Sometimes we 
defend it as possible, and try to prove that it may 
have happened ; sometimes as probable, and we try 
to show that it likely happened; sometimes as 
actual, and we try to prove its reality. Jesus takes 
His resurrection out of the possible and probable, 
and even out of the actual realm, into that of the 
absolute, and says the resurrection was unavoid- 
able. 

We are in the habit of regarding the cross as a 
necessity. We say that it was necessary for Christ 
to die. But there are those who think of the resur- 
rection as blessed, if true; but who say that 
whether it be true or not, we have the cross ; and 
so they brush the resurrection aside as unimpor- 
tant. Calvary was the great reality, Easter morn- 
ing but the airy fabric of a poet's dream. Such 

85 



7 



86 THE NECESSITY OF THE RESURRECTION 

men would do well to sit longer at the feet of the 
great Teacher, Who said: " The Son of man must 
rise again." 

The cross made the resurrection a necessity. If 
Christ did not rise, His death was defeat, and our 
preaching vain. Calvary was not an atonement, 
but an execution. But if Christ arose, then Christ 
died as a sacrifice, and not as a victim, and every 
soul that trusts in Him is saved. 

The resurrection is a necessity because of the 
race. If Christ rose not, we are of all men the 
most miserable. Death is an awful void. But if 
Christ rose, we shall rise also. We shall meet 
again the loved " whom we have lost a while." In- 
deed, we have never lost them. The Saviour's 
words: " I go to prepare a place for you " are not 
an echo from the pulseless dust to mock our de- 
spair, but hope's harbinger to every broken heart. 

Christ's heavenly ministry makes His resurrec- 
tion a necessity. He did not complete His work 
as the world's Redeemer when He expired on the 
cross. He finished His expiatory work, but the 
ministry of intercession remains. " He ever 
liveth to make intercession for us." But if Christ 
did not rise, there is no intercession. No one rep- 
resents us at the throne. We have nothing but our 
weak arms and pious moods. The grim foe we 
face laughs us to scorn, and makes doom certain. 
Religion is a canting pantomime, and existence a 
horrible nightmare. 



THE NECESSITY OF THE BESUKBECTION 87 

Christ's kingdom makes His resurrection a 
necessity. Kingdom means a king. Christ promised 
His disciples to return, but if He did not rise, He 
will never come back. The slopes of Olivet will 
never thrill again at the touch of His blessed feet. 
The shades of Gethsemane will never again robe 
Him with reverent silence as He prays. The east- 
ern sky will never more empurple and change to 
gold at the glory of His coming. His people will 
wait in vain for the sound of His voice and the 
spell of His presence, for He is gone forever. 

Do you begin to see why Jesus said, not merely: 
" I must suffer, I must be rejected, I must be 
killed," but also: "I must rise again; I must rise 
to make the cross a crown, to make the tomb 
aflame with light for all who follow Me ; to make 
death a door, and the sepulchre an entry into life ; 
to clear the way to the throne, where I may pray 
my people into power. I must rise for the king- 
dom"? And He did. 

Therefore it is the risen and living Christ we 
remember in the sacrament which celebrates His 
death. If Christ were not risen, the Holy Supper 
would plunge us into melancholy and despair. Be- 
cause He is risen, it fills us with the courage of an 
immortal hope. 



XII 
THE GLORIOUS DEATH 

"Signifying by what death he should glorify God" 

— John 21:19. 

IT is possible for one to glorify God by the way 
he lives, and unless he does, he is not likely to 
glorify God by the way he dies. Death-bed 
repentance is within the range of possibility, to be 
sure, but there is not much credit in such a course. 
If one's life shames God, his death is not likely to 
glorify Him; but if his life be right, it is possible 
not only for one to glorify God by the way he dies, 
but to make death his supreme and crowning trib- 
ute to his Redeemer. 

It is something like this that Christ meant when, 
speaking to Peter, He signified by what death He 
should glorify God. On the whole, Peter's life had 
been to God's glory. To be sure, there were some 
dark spots. There was the failure of his faith 
when he walked on the water to go to Jesus. 
There was the hour when his boasting outran his 
conduct. There was the dark night of apostasy 
and denial. But there had been repentance, and 
Peter had rallied and become a new man. But 
Jesus says to him: "Your great chance is yet to 
come. It will come when you are face to face with 
death. Then is the hour when you will win your 



crown." 



88 



THE GLOKIOTJS DEATH 89 

While Jesus said this about a disciple, in a fuller 
and truer sense He could have said it of Himself. 
He was just from the cross and the tomb. Re- 
cently He had died. He had hung on Calvary and 
slept in Joseph's garden, and He comes back from 
it all to say that death is not humiliation and de- 
feat, but opportunity and achievement. It is 
glorious. 

The Penal Scar 

Christ bore a penal scar. He was put to death 
with ignominy. He suffered the shameful death 
of the cross. In all the history of human punish- 
ment and torture, it is doubtful if there has ever 
been devised a method of capital punishment more 
barbarous, more humiliating to its victim, with 
more of torture in its experience than death by 
crucifixion, and Christ was crucified. To add to 
the infamy of this penal scar, to deepen His shame 
and humiliation, and to intensify His defeat, Jesus 
was crucified between two common thieves. As if 
to make mockery of His sufferings, the soldiers 
who drove the nails into His quivering flesh and 
thrust the spear into His blessed side and pressed 
the thorn crown on His holy brow and guarded 
the spot lest some friend should do something to 
mitigate His pain or relieve His distress sat down 
before the cross on which hung the dying Christ 
and gambled for His seamless robe. 

How can Christ ever throw off such a defeat? 



90 THE GLOBIOTJS DEATH 

It would seem that the penal scar of Calvary is 
there to stay, that the disgrace and obliquy which 
His enemies put upon Him in His death would 
either cover His name with oblivion or stain it 
with a perpetual infamy. It has done neither. 

The Glorious Triumph 

Christ's death was His supreme and glorious 
triumph. It was His sublimest opportunity to 
glorify God, for Jesus came to die. He taught and 
preached, He worked miracles and shared man's 
lot, but He came to die. The cross was His goal. 
Death for Him, therefore, was not defeat, but 
achievement. His enemies thought they were put- 
ting Him to death as a common criminal. In 
reality they were assisting at His coronation, for 
they were doing what the determinate counsel and 
foreknowledge of God had foreordained. 

Christ's death was His sublimest act of obedi- 
ence to the divine will. Jesus placed His foot on 
the summit stair of service there at Calvary. He 
came to do the Father's will. He was doing it in 
every act and word and expression of His life. In 
all there was perfect harmony. But there at the 
cross was the supreme test. The prayer of Geth- 
semane was still trembling on His lips: " Father, 
if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Never- 
theless, not my will, but thine, be done." Into the 
shadow He went with the cry: " My God, my God, 
why hast thou forsaken me?" It sounds like an 



THE GLORIOUS DEATH 91 

echo from the Old Testament. " Though he slay 
me, yet will I trust him." " This he said, signify- 
ing by what death he should glorify God." 

Christ's death was His glorious triumph because 
by it He revealed to men the fact that God was a 
Father. It was this that He came to accomplish. 
He said: " He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." There is nothing that so glorifies God as 
this discovery not that God has power and wisdom 
and knowledge and holiness and truth, but that He 
is a Father. There on the cross Jesus made the 
supreme revelation of God. He scattered the 
mists. He tore away the veil. He let us gaze full 
upon the uncovered face of deity, and as the spirit 
beheld, it cried: " Abba Father ! " 

Christ's triumphant death gives back to God His 
wayward, wandering children. His death was the 
atonement, the at-one-ment, the great reconcilia- 
tion. By His stripes we are healed. His blood 
cleanses us from all sin. Through Christ's death 
the lost sinner is saved. What a chant rises from 
the ransomed throng who have washed their robes 
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, 
and who sing: " Glory and honour and power be 
unto him ! " And they sing thus signifying by 
what death He should glorify God ! 

The Adoration of the Cross 
The world has long since come to worship the 
penal scars of the crucified Christ. Jesus Who 



92 THE GLOKIOUS DEATH 

died on Calvary is the Hero of the race. Every- 
thing looks His way. He is the Leader and 
Saviour of mankind. His name is above every 
name, and His kingdom of fraternity and peace 
is the dream of the nation. 

Christ is the world's Hero because He died, — 
not because He was cradled in Bethlehem, not be- 
cause He lived in Nazareth as the Son of a car- 
penter, not because He walked the dusty roads and 
climbed the rough mountainsides and suffered with 
the poor and the needy, but because He walked the 
winding thorn-path to the cross-crowned hill, and 
there laid down His life. For this we adore Him. 
His disciples did not try to hide the fact that He 
died. They proclaimed it. Woe to the Church 
should it ever come to obscure or apologize for the 
death of Christ! 

It is the cross that is the symbol of power, — not 
the manger cradle, not the sunshine throne, but the 
cross, the blood-stained, shadowed cross on which 
He died. It is the cross that crowns our church 
spires with hope. It is the cross that waves on our 
battle flags. And it is the cross we wear on our 
hearts. 

It is the death of Christ we hallow in the com- 
munion. The sacramental symbols speak to us not 
so much of the morn when the startled shepherds 
came nor of the night when the wise men knelt 
at the stable shrine nor of the hour when the mul- 
titudes thronged Him by the lakeside nor of the 



THE GLOEIOUS DEATH 93 

day He made His triumphal entry through the 
waving palms into Jerusalem, but of that dark hour 
when the sun hid its face and the dead walked the 
earth and Jesus hanging between heaven and earth 
gave His life a ransom for many. " For as often 
as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show 
the Lord's death till he come." 

Let us not obscure the cross nor make little of 
that of which Christ makes much. Let us not fear 
death, not because death is unreal, but because it is 
real, because being real, Christ has tasted death for 
every man, and by making death tell the story of 
God's love, and by making death open wide to 
sinners the gates of life, has made death glorious. 

What is Christ's death to me? I study His 
teachings, admire His example, praise the Sermon 
on the Mount, proclaim the kingdom of fraternity, 
but what is it to me that He Who said all this and 
did all this, Who gave the world the secret of the 
new heavens and the new earth, and Who lived the 
fairest life the world has known, hung in loneli- 
ness on a cross and poured out His life unto death? 
What is it to me that Christ died, died for me ? 

Let us gather around the cross and speak in 
whispers and say to our hearts: " He died for me." 
Let us look on the penal scars of Calvary and wor- 
ship Him. As we see the print of the nails let us 
adore Him. As we see the halo on His brow and 
the love light in His face, as we eat the bread and 
drink the cup to show forth His death, let our 



94 THE GLOEIOUS DEATH 

hearts be singing the old song of a green hill far 
away, where Jesus died 

" — that we might be forgiven 
He died to make us good, 
That we might go at last to heaven, 
Saved by His precious blood ! " 



XIII 
TAKING CHRIST FROM THE CROSS 

" He came therefore and took the body of Jesus." 

—John 19:38. 

THIS verse hangs two pictures on the wall. 
The first is the picture of Christ in the 
hands of His enemies. They are nailing 
Him to the cross. The rude scaffold is silhouetted 
against the sky. To the cross on the right with 
heavy thongs they bind a thief. To the cross on 
the left they do likewise. Then they lift the cen- 
tral cross from its place, and laying it down on the 
ground they stretch their victim on its gaunt tim- 
bers, and instead of thongs they drive the nails 
through His quivering flesh. Then they lift the 
tree with its human burden, and with a jar of 
keenest torture they drop the cross to its place. 

Christ in the Hands of His Enemies 

For three long hours Christ hung there between 
heaven and earth in sacrificial expiation for human 
guilt. The blistering sun beat down on His 
fevered, aching body, until He cried : " I thirst ! " 
The crowd of sightseers went by wagging their 
heads and saying: " He saved others, himself he 
cannot save." His executioners sat down before 

95 



96 TAKING CHEIST FROM THE CROSS 

the suffering Christ, and gambled for His gar- 
ments. Above all this from the pale lips of the 
crucified came the prayer: " Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do ! " And one who 
saw all this was converted, until across his lips, 
stained often with profanity, passed the prayer: 
" Remember me ! " And a Roman soldier who 
was enough of a man to scorn hypocrisy and wor- 
ship heroism looked up into Christ's face and said: 
" Truly this was the Son of God! " 

Then by and by the little group of friends watch- 
ing yonder in the distance draw nearer until they 
talk to Him and look through streaming eyes into 
the face they love. Among them is His mother, 
she who held Him in her arms that wondrous 
night the shepherds came, who saw the homage of 
the Magi for her Hero Child, who noted His 
every act and word during those happy years at 
Nazareth and followed Him always with her heart 
This is the tragic end of it all. As they wait there 
while the shadows deepen about them Jesus safe^ 
guards the future of His human mother as He 
gives her to John's care, saying: " Woman, behold 
thy son," and then to John: " Behold thy mother." 
Then He seems to turn from His human mother to 
His divine Father, only to find the face turned 
away, until in His loneliness He cries: " My God, 
why hast thou forsaken me?" Soon the worn 
body falls into the arms of death waiting to re- 
ceive it, but in that moment the spirit evades death, 



TAKING CHRIST FROM THE CROSS 97 

and while leaving His body in death's arms, Christ 
cries: " Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit." "And having said this, he gave up the 
ghost." " It is finished." The price has been paid. 
Christ has died on the cross. Directly a Roman 
soldier in wanton brutality will drive his spear into 
the dead Christ's side, and there will pour out 
blood mingled with water. The Saviour's heart 
was broken. 

Christ in the Hands of His Friends 

The second picture is that of Christ in the hands 
of His friends. They are taking Him from the 
cross. Who will have courage enough for that 
sublime devotion? He must risk his own life who 
attempts it. He must brave the crowd which this 
morning shouted: "Crucify Him!" He must 
face the hate which drove the nails into His hands. 
One must jeopardize his position, his property, life 
itself, to stand by that central cross and say to 
Annas and Caiaphas and Pilate and Herod and the 
mob : " You have killed Him, but though He be 
dead, I worship Him still ! " Where are those who 
will risk all to save the body of Christ from a 
pauper's grave ? 

Who will have influence enough to secure per- 
mission from Christ's enemies to pay such a 
tribute to the memory of Jesus? Doubtless His 
disciples at last are ready to die for Him ; they will 
face the crowd and say what needs to be said, even 



98 TAKING CHRIST FROM THE CROSS 

though it may mean that they must walk to-mor- 
row the sorrowful way to their own Calvary. But 
they are without influence. Should they ask 
Pilate for the body of Jesus, his answer would 
doubtless be to order them to jail. The petition 
must come from a man whose standing is such 
that Pilate will cringe. 

Thus it was that Joseph of Arimathea is the 
disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, 
who finds himself, and shaking off his timidity, 
emerges into the open. In the hour of his Master's 
defeat, Joseph proclaims his faith. He is wealthy 
and influential, and at last he is courageous. He 
goes to Pilate and begs the dead body of Jesus. 
Then with Nicodemus, another secret disciple who 
had come to Jesus by night, but who is going now 
in the blazing day in the fierce light of the sensa- 
tion that was sweeping Jerusalem, Joseph of Ari- 
mathea goes to take Christ from the cross. 

Doubtless these two men had other of Christ's 
disciples to assist them in this blessed ministry. 
Tenderly and lovingly they lift the dear form from 
that scaffold of expiation. Reverently they pre- 
pare it for entombment. Then Joseph says: 
" Yonder in my garden amid the blooming flowers 
under the hillside is the tomb in which I had 
thought my own body might rest when at last God 
bids me come. The sepulchre is new. It is hewn 
from the solid rock. It is undefiled, for in it was 
man never yet laid. It overlooks the valley and 



TAKING CHEIST FEOM THE CEOSS 99 

commands the distant hills, and around the door 
the vines are climbing and near by the lilies soon 
will be in blossom. Let us lay His precious body 
there." 

Thus they took Christ's body from the cross and 
laid it in Joseph's tomb. These are the two pic- 
tures which hang before our faith, — the picture of 
Christ in the hands of His enemies and the picture 
of Christ in the hands of His friends. 

In Which Picture? 

Every one of us is in one or the other of these 
pictures. On must take some attitude toward 
Christ. He must be either for Him or against 
Him, for Christ is unavoidable. 

Are we nailing Him to the cross? The author 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of those who 
crucify the Son of God afresh. They make Cal- 
vary continuous. They prolong the crucifixion 
scene and lengthen it out on the canvas of time. 
We are told who these are. They were once en- 
lightened. They have tasted of the heavenly gift. 
They were made partakers of the Holy Ghost. 
They have tasted the good word of God and the 
powers of the world to come. But they have 
fallen away from all this. They have despised and 
rejected the values there presented, and doing so, 
they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh 
and put Him to an open shame. 

It was bad enough to crucify Christ the first 



100 TAKING CHEIST FEOM THE CEOSS 

time, to be a Pilate, a Caiaphas, to be the soldiers 
who drove the nails and cast lots for His robe, to 
belong to the crowd who passed by wagging their 
heads. But to do this now after all the light and 
love of two thousand years have rested on that 
scene is to incur a greater condemnation. Can it 
be possible for one thus to treat Jesus? Surely I 
could never nail Him to the cross, and yet he that 
is not for is against. 

Let us pray that we may be of the company of 
those who took Christ from the cross. Have we 
enough courage for that devotion, enough heroism 
to face the world and say: " This despised and re- 
jected man is my Saviour! Let men think of Him 
or of me. He is my glorious Redeemer. For His 
dear name I will live, and should He need it, I 
trust I may have grace for His glorious cause to 
die!" 

Christ would have us take Him from the cross. 
He has paid our debt. The atonement is finished. 
The work on Calvary is complete, but not His 
work among men. He is to leave the cross for 
the street, the home, the school, the office, the 
world, and we who are His friends must take Him 
there. 

He would have us take Him from the cross, not 
lay Him in another splendid tomb, as I fear we 
sometimes imagine, in some grand cathedral which 
is in reality a mausoleum. What He wants is for 
His people to translate Him, His ideals, His love, 



TAKING CHEIST FEOM THE CEOSS 101 

His strength, His law of sacrifice, His sympathy 
and tenderness and forgiveness into the life of this 
weary, sin-smitten world. 

We are to take Him from the cross to the throne. 
He is to reign until He has put all enemies under 
His feet. He is to found a kingdom, to wear a 
crown and wield a sceptre. The cross merely 
marks the road to power, and to His disciples is 
given the act not of entombment but of enthrone- 
ment and of coronation. 

The Message of Communion 
The holy communion speaks to us of both pic- 
tures. It speaks of Christ on the cross. These 
sacramental symbols are a picture story of His 
passion. They tell us how He suffered. If we 
listen to them, they will tell us all that is in the 
first picture, of how He died. They tell us that He 
died for us that we might be forgiven, redeemed, 
and made the sons and daughters of the Lord Al- 
mighty. 

It also speaks to us of taking Christ from the 
cross. The message of the risen Christ was: " Go 
ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every 
creature." This, too, is the message of the em- 
blems. The Christ Who died must live. We 
must preach Him until He lives in every man and 
in every land and in all the life of the world. We 
must put Him on the throne until the kingdoms of 
the world are His kingdoms. We must make 



102 TAKING CHEIST FROM THE CROSS 

Christ King. In the observance of the sacrament 
the heart that loves Christ is singing under its 
breath: "Oh, sacred Head, once wounded," but it 
is also singing in sublime expectation: 

" Jesus shall reign where'er the sun 
Does his successive journeys run." 



XIV 
THE HUMAN CHRIST 

"And Jesus went forth and saw a great multitude, and was 
moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their 
sick."— Matthew 14 : 14. 

JESUS was worn out with His work. He was 
trying to get away from the crowd for a bit 
of rest. His nerves were on edge. He must 
have quiet and a chance to relax from the awful 
strain and tax the insistent and ceaseless throngs 
made on Him. And so He turns His face toward 
the desert. Scarcely have His tired body and spent 
spirit yielded to repose when there they are. The 
crowds have invaded His desert. They are violat- 
ing His sanctuary, swarming about Him, clamour- 
ing to see Him, demanding His attention. They 
will give Him no rest. 

What did Jesus say ? Did He issue an order to 
drive them away? Did He say: "These people 
have no consideration. They are selfish. They are 
pitiless. They would have me die in my tracks. 
I have done enough. I am worn out. Send them 
away. Tell them to be quiet. Stop their noise 
that I may sleep. Get rid of them somehow, for I 
must rest "3 

103 



104 THE HUMAN CHEIST 

Had we been in His place, it is something like 
this we would have said. We have little patience 
with any one who disturbs our repose. A bill was 
once introduced into the Legislature of North 
Carolina forbidding the running of trains at night 
on a certain branch of the Southern Railway, be- 
cause the noise of the trains disturbed the rest of 
a certain wealthy and well-known citizen of the old 
North State. Few are influential enough to secure 
legislation that will paralyze public traffic for their 
private benefit. And yet when worn out with 
work, and with nerves on edge, one does feel he has 
a right to a bit of quiet. Nevertheless, Jesus never 
thought of Himself. The crowds have broken in 
on His rest. How does He take it? "And Jesus 
went forth and saw a great multitude, and was 
moved with compassion toward them, and he 
healed their sick." 

The Compassion of Christ 

When Jesus looked out on the crowd, He saw 
plenty to criticize, much that was wrong, a lot that 
was selfish, not a little that was vile. 

He saw Sabbath-breakers, people who had no 
respect for the Fourth Commandment, who made 
the day of rest a season of godless gain and pleas- 
ure. Some seem to regard Sabbath desecration as 
a modern iniquity. It is the most ancient of trans- 
gressions. 

He saw people who were dishonest in business, 



THE HUMAN CHRIST 106 

who did not hesitate to cheat and lie in order to 
make money, who overcharged, who profiteered, 
who were not willing to pay their honest debts, 
who were guilty of duplicity and rascality. These 
things went on in the good old days that are gone. 

He saw corrupt politicians. We think some of 
the political deals of our day register the last act 
in the betrayal of a public trust, but present-day 
politics is a Sunday-school affair in comparison 
with what went on in Christ's time. 

He saw worldliness. He saw the vain show. 
He saw people who sat down to eat and to drink, 
and who rose up to play. He saw the revel of 
Bacchus and the riot of passion. It was a day 
when a dancing girl won as her trophy the drip- 
ping head of John the Baptist, when the ritual of 
religion consisted in the practice of the rites of the 
goddess of lust. 

He saw hypocrisy. He saw men wearing the 
livery of heaven to serve the devil in. He saw 
rascality piously veneering itself, and scoundrels 
hiding behind the skirts of priests, and hands 
stained with crime serving at the altar, and lips 
foul with blasphemy reciting the creed. He saw 
much to criticize. But the strange thing is that no 
criticism fell from His lips. 

He was moved with compassion. He was 
touched with pity. He was rilled with a sadness 
that sometimes could express itself only in tears. 
The sin of the world did not make Him bitter. 



106 THE HUMAN CHRIST 

Christ was not censorious. The only things which 
ever stirred Him to anger and denunciation were 
bigotry and hypocrisy. Even these did not lead 
Him to gather His garments about Him with a 
" holier-than-thou " attitude to life and withdraw 
from the crowd. Instead of drawing back, He 
pushed in where the crowd was, right into the thick 
of soiled and stained and defeated humanity. 

This does not mean that He was tolerant toward 
sin. How could He be? He came to fight it, to 
disarm it of its power, to destroy its hold on human 
life, to die Himself on the accursed cross that He 
might lift from its victims the curse of sin. One 
does not understand the compassion of Jesus who 
thinks it means a pale morality. Christ was sin- 
less. With Him, holiness was a passion. The piti- 
ful Christ was pitiless toward sin. 

But He was patient with the sinner. He dis- 
tinguished between sin and the sinner. It is a dis- 
tinction we sometimes fail to make, and failing, we 
become critical and censorious instead of compas- 
sionate. We stand off with a self-righteous air 
and deliver ourselves of a gloomy jeremiad of our 
times, of a bitter tirade against our fellow-men, of 
a fierce denunciation of the sins and shortcomings 
of Sabbath-breakers and profiteers, of grafters and 
worldlings and hypocrites. The result is, we leave 
the sick world as sick and sad and hopeless as we 
found it. It was not so with Jesus. He saw a 
great multitude and was moved with compassion. 



THE HUMAN CHEIST 107 

The Helping Christ 

Jesus helped people because He had compassion 
on them. This was His method of treatment. It 
was His prescription for a broken and desperate 
and despairing world. He administered patience 
and love. Read the Gospel story. Now He sees 
the people as sheep not having a shepherd, and He 
has compassion. Now it is a leper, ostracized from 
his kind, and He has compassion. Yonder two 
blind men are crying for mercy, and He has com- 
passion. Here is a stained girl from the street, 
and Jesus sees her and has compassion on her. 

He has compassion because He sees in every 
sinner God's child, estranged, wayward, lost, but 
still with the tracery of the Father there. He sees 
in every rich man Zaccheus, a potential philan- 
thropist. He sees in labouring men what He saw 
in the fishermen of Galilee, apostles, evangelists, 
world-builders. He saw in the bedeviled de- 
moniac of the tomb not a poor creature to be sent 
to an insane asylum, but a human being to be 
emancipated, and who, when clothed and in his 
right mind, was to become a witness for his Re- 
deemer. He saw in the girl of the street not an 
outcast to be stoned by society's cold and merci- 
less throng, but one who might become an angel 
of mercy. He saw in the thief on the cross a citi- 
zen of Paradise. All this He saw because He was 
moved with compassion. 

Jesus saw this godlike side of life being ignored, 



108 THE HUMAN CHEIST 

repressed, despised, retarded, proscribed, defeated. 
This is what saddened Him. And He saw that the 
way to release it and to enable it to gain the ascend- 
ency in the soul was not to turn upon it the fierce 
wrath of God, but to summon it with gentle love. 
Hence as Jesus moved among men, He did more 
than rebuke them, more than condemn. He had 
compassion on them, and saved them. He helped 
them to find themselves and become the sons and 
daughters of their Heavenly Father. 

The Human Christ 

Jesus had compassion because He was human. 
At first blush this statement may be challenged, but 
reflection will vindicate it. Jesus was " tempted in 
all points like as we are." He was widely human. 
His experience swept the whole gamut of human 
life. Therefore He can be touched with the feel- 
ing of our infirmities. He can feel as we feel, and 
feeling thus, He has compassion. This is the great 
lesson of the incarnation. It is godhood becoming 
human. It is not godhood becoming censorious 
and denunciatory, but human. I was talking one 
day with a Jew who had accepted Christ in one of 
my meetings. He was describing how Christ ap- 
pealed to him. He said: "Jesus has humanized 
the religion of the Old Testament." It seemed to 
me a fine characterization of the purpose of the in- 
carnation. Christ did not found a new religion, 
but He did humanize the religion of the Old Tes- 



THE HUMAN CHEIST 109 

tament. Some people are living back there. They 
are hard, hard as Sinai. Jesus did not repeal the 
moral law, but He did humanize it. He did say: 
" Love is the fulfilling of the law." 

And so, as He looks out on the crowd, Jesus sees 
people, not the multitude, but men and women and 
children, not social units, but fathers and mothers 
and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters 
and neighbors and friends. He singles us out of 
the crowd. He sees the old man moving with 
slow step down life's last hill, and sympathizes 
w T ith his attitude to life. He sees the mother 
crooning over a baby in her arms, and understands 
her yearning and hope. He sees the father as he 
says good-bye to the boy who is leaving home, and 
knows all that gathers around that parting. He 
sees the labourer as he leaves for his work in the 
morning, and enters with him into his day of toil. 
He sees the criminal behind the bars, and enters 
into sympathy with him. And because Jesus sees 
all this, not merely civilization and laws and na- 
tions, but people, He has pity. 

He sees this because He is so human. His hu- 
manity is big, high, wide, capacious, tender. Here 
is the great proof of His godhood. There are 
those, perhaps, who believe in Jesus because of His 
miracles. I believe in the miracles because of 
Jesus. Christ is the greatest argument for Christi- 
anity. When He asked Peter: " Whom do men 
say that I the Son of Man am?" Peter replied: 



110 THE HUMAN CHEIST 

" Son of God! " He seems to say: " Thou art so 
human, Thy humanity is so big, so racial, so sub- 
lime, so all-embracing, that Thou art more than 
Son of Man: Thou art God ! " 

It is this gentle, human Christ Who comes to 
meet us as we gather around the holy table. He 
would sit with us here at the feast. He would be 
as friendly with us as with that little group on the 
night of the first supper. He is our Redeemer, but 
He is our Elder Brother, too. He is our closest 
comrade, and always with us. 

There are a lot of lonely people in the world, and 
perhaps because they are lonely, some of them are 
bad. God made us to be social beings. Solitude 
is hell. The prodigal reached the depths when 
" no man gave unto him." Some one has painted 
a picture of two polar bears on a field of ice. One 
of the bears is dead, starved to death in the bleak 
Arctic world, and his mate stands beside him look- 
ing down with an expression, not of fear so much 
as of pain. The artist calls his picture " Solitude." 
When one feels that none is left to care, it is a 
frozen world, and there is nothing left but death. 
What people need to-day is friendship and sym- 
pathy. It is the human Christ Who heals the hurts 
of humanity, and He heals them by being human. 
It is divine to be human. 



XV 
THE DIVINE CHRIST 

" Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery 
to be equal with God" — Phhjppians 2:6. 

THE word " divinity " has been greatly 
cheapened. There are those who admit 
the divinity of Christ, but who deny His 
deity. There are those who admit that Christ is 
divine, but who claim that man is also divine. If 
Christ is divine only as we are, then He was a 
good man, but no more, and He has no more claim 
on our remembrance than thousands of others who 
have loved and served and suffered and died. It is 
a God we remember at the Holy Supper. 

Laying Aside His Godhood 

And yet Christ's first act as the world's Re- 
deemer was to lay His godhood aside. It is a 
strange and arresting thing said by Paul in his 
letter to the Philippians ; in speaking of Christ, he 
declares: " Who being in the form of God, thought 
it not robbery to be equal with God." The Ameri- 
can revision translates it: "Being on an equality 
with God." And Dr. Moffatt uses the luminous 
phrase: " Though He was divine by nature, He did 

in 



112 THE DIVINE CHEIST 

not snatch at equality with God, but emptied Him- 
self.' ' All of these translations, however, are but 
different ways of saying that in His earthly min- 
istry Jesus deliberately laid His godhood aside. 
He did not draw on His divine powers to protect 
and sustain Himself during the period of His temp- 
tation and suffering. His human experience was 
real. His agony on the cross was actual. Jesus 
was not an actor playing a part. He was a self- 
elected sufferer vicariously enduring the penalty of 
sin for the human race. 

Because He laid His godhood aside in facing His 
passion, we are not to conclude that He had any 
doubt about His deity. He was so certain of that 
that He could afford to empty Himself. Neither 
are we to conclude that in any sense He ceased to 
be God. How could He? One can refrain from 
exercising certain powers which he possesses, but 
he does not thereby cease to be himself. Nor does 
it mean that He did not exercise these powers for 
others. Indeed it was just this Christ did in His 
divine nature, and this constituted the pathos and 
grandeur of His ministry. He fed the multitudes, 
but He declined to change one stone to bread to 
end His own fast. He healed the wounds of 
others, but He refused to staunch His own. He 
raised Lazarus from the dead, but He declined to 
protect Himself against death. This course was 
not accidental. It was intentional. Christ was 
not a victim. He was a victor. 



THE DIVINE CHEIST 113 

And so this strange line reciting the descent of a 
God into the valley of humiliation does not stop 
with the descent. It also chants His ascent toward 
the heights of exaltation. Indeed, when we under- 
stand aright Christ's descent, it was itself an 
ascent. Jesus was none the less God in the valley 
than on the heights. The human Christ being so 
capaciously, so transcendantly human, could be 
none other than the divine Christ. And so Paul 
paints both portraits. " Who being in the form of 
God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, 
but made himself of no reputation, and took upon 
him the form of a servant, and was made in the 
likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a 
man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto 
death, even the death of the cross." 

" Wherefore God hath still highly exalted him 
and given him a name which is above every name, 
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, 
of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things 
under the earth, and that every tongue should 
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of 
God the Father." 

Recognizing His Godhood 
The godhood of Jesus is not something for us to 
lay aside. Perhaps some one may ask: " How do 
you know that Jesus is God? " I might answer: 
" I believe it. I believe some things I do not know. 
My faith is that Jesus is divine as well as human. 



114 THE DIVINE CHEIST 

But if this faith is not to be condemned as credu- 
lity, it must prove its reasonableness. I think it 
can. 

I believe in the godhood of Jesus because of the 
teachings of the Bible. It is sometimes said that 
the Bible does not anywhere say that Jesus is God. 
One may admit that the Bible does not argue the 
deity of Christ. It assumes it. It takes it for 
granted, and in certain passages, like the prelude to 
John's Gospel, it declares it in the clearest and 
most unmistakable language. 

The Bible is trustworthy. It has been tried and 
tested and assailed as no other book, and it has 
come out of all conflicts victorious. Shall we de- 
cline to accept its testimony? Shall we accept 
what pleases us and reject of the Book what we 
dislike? Shall we accept what it says about the 
human Christ and reject what it says about the 
divine Christ? You cannot treat the Bible that 
way. You cannot claim what suits you and repudi- 
ate what disturbs you. 

I believe in the godhood of Jesus because He 
said things which only a God has a right to say. 
" I am the way, the truth, and the life." " I and 
my Father are one." " I am the bread of life." 
"If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, 
you shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto 
you." These words do not sit well on the lips of a 
mere man, but if Jesus is God, they are what we 
would expect Him to say. 



THE DIVINE CHBIST 115 

I believe in His deity because He did things 
which only a God has power to do. He worked 
miracles. He healed disease. He cast out devils. 
He raised the dead. He rose from the dead. One 
may say He did all this because He had a pro- 
founder insight into the working of nature's laws. 
No doubt there is much of truth in the statement. 
Probably if we knew what Jesus knew we might 
do many of the things He did. And we might find 
that much which now seems miraculous was merely 
the working out of higher laws. Nevertheless, is 
it not strange that Jesus was the only man with 
this knowledge? How did that peasant Jew, un- 
lettered, back in that dim age, acquire all this 
knowledge? Where was ever a school that could 
teach what Jesus knew ? It taxes faith more to be- 
lieve that He was a mere man who did this than it 
does to believe in His deity. 

I believe in His godhood because no other man 
has ever been what Jesus was. He is admitted to 
be the one perfect man in human history. There 
was a moral grandeur about His character that has 
never been matched. He towers high above all the 
other teachers. He had a big and intimate under- 
standing of human nature. In the most provincial 
land and of a most provincial race, He Himself was 
cosmopolitan. He had a self-effacement that is 
the despair of others. If He is only human, why 
is He the only human to be this? Why are we 
not growing other men bigger and better? I be- 



116 THE DIVINE CHEIST 

lieve in His godhood because He is unmatched 
among men. 

Not only so, but Jesus is doing what no other 
man can do. He died on the cross two thousand 
years ago and was buried, but in His name men 
leave all, endure all, attempt all. Through faith 
in Him the world is getting better. Sinners are 
changing. Human nature is regenerated. Sorrow 
is comforted. Calamity is courageously faced. 
Defeat is changed to victory. Why are not other 
men able to inspire this in their followers? 
Mohammed, Confucius, Buddha, have left a dead 
world in their trail, but Jesus is the light and life of 
men. 

Is not this enough to vindicate one's faith 
against a charge of credulity when he reverently 
declares: "I believe that Jesus is God!" But this 
is not all. There comes a time when those who do 
His will can say: " I know whom I have believed." 
I am as certain of the godhood of Christ as I am 
of any fact not susceptible of mathematical demon- 
stration. I know He is God through experience. 
This is the highest certitude. The senses may de- 
ceive us, the soul, never. 

The argument for the deity of Christ is simple. 
Either He is God or He is not. If He is not, He 
was either deceived about Himself or He was 
deceiving others about Himself. He was either 
mentally unbalanced or an impostor. No one who 
studies the teachings of Jesus can accept either of 



THE DIVINE CHEIST 117 

those alternatives. Then Jesus was God. But the 
soul wants more than argument. It wants convic- 
tion and assurance, and these come not as the result 
of a mental process but of a life-experience. 

Claiming His Godhood 

The godhood of Jesus is something to claim. 
Let us not be so absorbed with trying to prove that 
Jesus is God that we shall fail to appropriate the 
glorious truth. The Bible does not attempt to 
prove that Jesus is God. It grandly proceeds on 
the premise of His deity. On the last great day 
of the feast Jesus stood and said: "If any man 
thirst, let him come to me and drink." He would 
have us approach Him, recognize Him that He is 
very God and abundantly able to supply all our 
needs. 

If Jesus is God, He can and will keep His prom- 
ises. We can bank on them. All that He taught 
is true. All that He said about God and the here- 
after is dependable. If He is only man, He may 
be mistaken, but if He is God, there is certainty. 

If Jesus is God, He can save us. He can for- 
give our sins and change our natures. He can 
give us power to become the children of God. He 
can underwrite destiny. If He is merely a man, 
His influence is vague, but if God, He is the mighty 
Redeemer. 

If Jesus is God, His cause will triumph. Noth- 
ing can defeat it. The world will come His way. 



118 THE DIVINE CHEIST 

Indeed, it is coming His way. Slowly but surely 
civilization is being constructed in accordance with 
His teachings. If Jesus is merely a man, there is 
no more hope for the triumph of His teachings 
than for those of any other good man, but if He be 
God, His cause is scheduled for victory, and 
against it the gates of hell shall not prevail. 

Why not claim the godhood of Christ and make 
it a part of your creed ? There is nothing to lose, 
but much to gain. It is better to have a great 
Christ than a small one. What if there are doubts ? 
Is it not better to follow faith than doubts ? Uni- 
tarianism has nothing to offer that the old Gospel 
does not offer, but there is much that it would take 
away. Why be reduced? If one is to take chances 
either way, is it not better to take them on the side 
of our hopes than of our fears? 

There is no drawing power in a negation. There 
is no lifting and inspiring power in a denial. What 
the world needs is not negations, but positions. 
Society has nothing to fear from faith in the deity 
of Christ. Perhaps some one may say that it has 
nothing to fear from a denial of His deity. But 
has it anything to hope from such denial ? There 
can be no great expectations from a cult that en- 
gages to do for one only what he can do for him- 
self. The sinner needs a Saviour who has power, 
who is able to reach down and lift up, who can 
transform the individual, who is able to save unto 
the uttermost. Such is Jesus. 



THE DIVINE CHEIST 119 

If Jesus is God, the supernatural becomes natu- 
ral. I can understand how He did what is re- 
corded of Him. I am not puzzled by what has 
been going on ever since. I have an explanation 
of the marvellous achievements of those early dis- 
ciples. I am not surprised that they faced the 
dungeon and stake without a fear, and that the 
gospel on their lips, weak men though they were, 
conquered the earth. But if Jesus was merely a 
man, one of ten thousand other victims, it is all a 
hopeless tangle. 

And yet salvation is not through a dogma, but 
a person. Jesus did not say believe in a creed. 
He said: " Come to me." One may come to Him, 
even though he may have intellectual difficulties 
about His deity. At first the early disciples saw 
in Jesus only His humanity. Then later as they 
came to know Him better, the veil lifted and they 
saw God. Let us receive Him for all that He is, 
and for all that He can do for us, and learn to 
know Him by living Him. 

Thus He offers Himself to us at the holy table, 
and thus He offers Himself to us in all life. He 
approaches us along the needs that are nearest. 
He ties Himself to our human nature, not only that 
He may know us, but that we may know Him, 
and as we follow Him and serve Him and try to be 
like Him, the light breaks, and on the altar stairs 
our lips are saying: " Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God!"; 



XVI 
WHY CHRIST IS NOT FORGOTTEN 

" The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins/* 

— Matthew 9 : 6. 

THE world has grown so accustomed to one 
of its strangest events as to regard it as 
ordinary and commonplace. This event 
is the sacramental remembrance of Jesus of Naza- 
reth. At best, Jesus was not widely known, and 
His career closed in apparently hopeless defeat. 
He wrote no book. He organized no institution. 
He founded no government. He created no 
church. He left behind Him noire of those signs 
and monuments by which the fame of men is kept 
from decay. There is not even a portrait of Jesus 
to perpetuate His memory, and His few followers 
at the first mutterings of storm broke in dismay 
and fled to cover. 

Yet none is so well or widely or lovingly or rev- 
erently remembered as Jesus of Nazareth. Nine- 
teen hundred years have gone by, but the Man of 
Galilee is not forgotten. To-day His followers 
are more numerous and His glorious fame more 
secure than that of any figure that has ever lifted 
its face along the skyline of history. 

120 



WHY CHEIST IS NOT FOEGOTTEN 121 

The High Hour of Worship 

Jesus is not only not forgotten, but to remember 
Him has become to millions of people their most 
solemn act of worship. When we observe the 
communion, we are doing what Christ's followers 
have been doing ever since that fateful hour long 
centuries ago when in the upper chamber in Jeru- 
salem on the night of the betrayal, on the eve of 
the crucifixion, Jesus passed the bread and the wine 
to His disciples, and said: "This do in remem- 
brance of me." 

There has been no break in this remembrance. 
The clock of time has struck no hour since then 
that has found earth empty of the thought of 
Christ. The memory of Jesus has been the real 
apostolic succession. Down the steps of time the 
saints have come, bearing aloft the Holy Grail, and 
chanting faith's recessional: " Lest we forget." 

In every land where Christianity has gone, the 
sacrament has been kept ; no matter what have been 
the customs or traditions of the people, no matter 
who their sages or heroes have been, the one name 
they have raised to hallowed heights and the one 
face they have loved best have been the name and 
face of Jesus. 

He has been remembered by all classes and sta- 
tions and conditions of men. The high and the low 
have broken bread from the same loaf, and the rich 
and the poor have touched adoring lips to the same 
chalice. They have bowed at one altar in sweet 



122 WHY CHEIST IS NOT FOEGOTTEN 

friendship of the name they loved, and they have 
forgotten there their differences. 

Sometimes in the face of the hardest and hottest 
opposition the sacrament has been observed. There 
are times when it meant the hazard of one's life to 
observe the Holy Supper. Hunted by persecution, 
driven out into the night, fleeing to the moors and 
caves, Christ's followers have kept the feast. They 
have said: "We will risk all. We will lose all, 
even life itself, but we will remember Him; and 
we will remember Him as He has asked us, when 
He said, This do." They have felt that this re- 
membrance of their Lord was faith's holiest hour 
and the soul's most solemn act of worship. 

What is the Explanation? 

Why is Christ so well and widely and lovingly 
remembered ? It can hardly be simply because He 
asked it. He did ask it, but other leaders have 
made requests of their followers, and they have 
been forgotten. There are other things which 
Christ asked of His followers, which His followers 
have left undone. 

It is not because of His origin. Christ's birth 
was wonderful as we now conceive it, but it did 
not seem so marvellous to them. Even if it had, 
the story of His birth could hardly keep the world 
spellbound for ages. 

It is not for His miracles that He is remembered. 
If that were all, Christ would have no further men- 



WHY CHEIST IS NOT FORGOTTEN 123 

tion than some startling headline. Wonders are 
over in seven days. The world refuses to be per- 
manently amazed. Marvels soon lose their edge. 

It is not because of His teachings that Jesus' 
memory is kept fresh. He was the world's great- 
est teacher, but people do not worship teachers. 
They admire and study them. There is something 
in Christ greater than anything He ever taught. 

It is not even His sufferings. There was His 
holiest hour. It is the suffering face of the 
marred Christ which appears in the sacrament, — 
not teacher, not wonder-worker, not saint, not 
peasant, but the thorn-crowned, sorrow-scarred 
face of the great sufferer. Yet even this is not 
enough to make His memory immortal. Others 
have suffered and been forgotten. 

It is not even His holy life. His life was un- 
equalled, but if that were all, Christ would be little 
more than a sacred relic. Men canonize their 
saints, and regard their duty as fully done. We 
must look beyond all these for the explanation. 

A Saviour 
Christ is not forgotten because He has power on 
earth to forgive sins. He alone has this power. 
He is able to put a broken-down soul on its feet 
again, to build up into decency and respectability 
and happiness the character that has fallen into 
decay. He is able to open the blind eyes of a 
sightless soul, to unstop the ears of the deaf, to 



124 WHY CHEIST IS NOT FORGOTTEN 

tear away the veil of doubt which shrouds the 
minds that grope in darkness, to renew the para- 
lyzed will, to emancipate the bondaged heart, to 
shake off the chains of evil habit, and sunder the 
death bands, and summon from the tomb of de- 
spair the soul dead in trespasses and in sin. 

Christ is able to do this, — not merely to promise 
it. Any religion can promise it. Christ makes 
good not in some distant world, not in some un- 
canny realm. Any religion can promise to save 
you after death. But Christ promises to save us 
on earth, and He keeps His promise. 

This is where Jesus comes to the throne. Spec- 
ulate as you will about the miracles of His Person, 
the virgin birth, the dual nature, the resurrection, 
explain as you may the miracles of His ministry, 
healing the sick, feeding the multitude, casting out 
devils, raising the dead, philosophize as you may 
about His teachings and seem to find the germ of 
all Christ taught in some older text-book, criticize 
His followers, allow doubt to have its say and w T ay, 
but at last you strike against a dead wall. There 
is one fact which declines to yield. It is the fact 
that " the Son of Man hath power on earth to for- 
give sins." 

The thing which Christ is doing is the thing 
which only a God can do. Men can teach; they 
can do wonders; but as the Pharisees themselves 
said: " Only God can forgive sin." 

It is what every member of the race must have 



WHY CHRIST IS NOT FOEGOTTEN 125 

done for him if he is not to go lame and despairing 
out into the great beyond ; for we " all have sinned 
and come short of the glory of God." We may 
make light of sin. We may hypnotize ourselves 
into the belief that our sins are merely indiscretions, 
and that we are not so much sinners as the victims 
of circumstance; but soon or late that stern hour 
will come forcing us to our knees and sending to 
our lips the old prayer: " Create in me a clean 
heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within 
me!" 

Suppose there were none to answer that cry, and 
no hope for the sin-sick soul, and no cure for the 
open sore of the world. Suppose there were no 
gospel for a life in trouble, for a character in de- 
cay, for a will in chains, for an unshriven soul on 
the brink of dissolution, nothing for such desperate 
need but mere maxims and mottoes and pratings 
about justice and a square deal ! The future would 
be a horror of despair, and there would be no an- 
swer to the supreme cry of the soul but for Christ. 
He is the only Saviour. The world's everlasting 
necessity is a remedy for sin. We can do without 
bread, air, sunshine, far better than without salva- 
tion. 

Christ alone can cure sin. He can cure it, — not 
discuss it, not describe it, not reveal it, not rebuke 
and condemn and threaten it, but Christ can cure 
sin! This is why He is not forgotten, and why, 
as long as the heart can remember, Jesus will be 



126 WHY CHEIST IS NOT FOEGOTTEN 

loved. The Son of Man has power on earth to 
forgive sins. Christianity is the only religion with 
a gospel, the only religion that can cleanse the 
guilty stains from the soul. " Though your sins 
be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; though 
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." 
Hallelujah ! " This do in remembrance of me." 

" When to the cross I turn mine eyes, 
And rest on Calvary, 
Oh, Lamb of God, my sacrifice, 
I must remember Thee." 



XVII 
JESUS ONLY 

" They saw no man any more, save Jesus only with them- 
selves." — Mark 9:8. 



n 



T 



HEY saw no man any more save Jesus 
only with themselves." It sounds like a 
note of disappointment. The disciples 
seem dejected. They have had a rapturous expe- 
rience, but it has ended tamely. After standing 
on the mountain top of privilege and gazing into the 
glory of the open heaven and listening to celestial 
voices, they must go down and back to the world 
as poor as they came. 

The Transfiguration 
The transfiguration has just taken place. Peter 
and James and John have been carried by Christ 
to the top of a high mountain. There before their 
eyes He was transfigured. His raiment shone 
with an unearthly lustre. Moses and Elias ap- 
peared and talked with Jesus. The disciples were 
thrilled. They were in an ecstasy. Peter said: 
" Let us build and stay." A voice out of the 
clouds said: "This is my beloved Son. Hear 
him." 

127 



128 JESUS ONLY 

And now it has all gone. The glory has passed 
away. There is no more any light. Moses and 
Elias have vanished. The voice has died down 
into dumb silence. The heavens look like any 
common day. They rub their eyes and look around 
and see no man any more save Jesus only with 
themselves. The glory of the great occasion is 
dead. It is useless to linger longer on that barren 
peak. There is nothing now to make Peter say: 
" Let us build." Divinity has perished from the 
landscape. They may as well descend. 

No, divinity has not perished. Jesus is there. 
True, His garments have no supernatural lustre 
now. It is the dull cloak with which they are so 
familiar. There is no vision from the spirit world. 
It is Jesus only. Yet the disciples take down all 
the glory seen on the summit, for Jesus had created 
it. He had released His power. He had lifted 
the curtain and let them see. He had given them 
one seraphic glimpse into the glory. But Jesus 
was always in possession of the beauty and power 
there revealed. The inhabitants of the celestial 
world were always that close to Him. The trans- 
figuration was potential within Him. 

There is no reason for dejection. Jesus only 
was all they had seen, and vastly more, and they 
have Him. They have Jesus only with them- 
selves. He will not leave them. The picture 
passes, but the substance tarries. Christ is theirs 
forever. He will never leave them. With Him 



JESUS ONLY 129 

they can afford to go back to duty, to work, to trial, 
back to the sick, weary world, to suffering, to per- 
secution and martyrdom. They saw no man any 
more, save Jesus only with themselves. But they 
can do all things through Him. All life is trans- 
figured. 

Our Transfigured Moments 

Ever and again it is given to His followers to 
look upon some transfiguration of the Christ, to 
come to some hour that exalts Him, to behold some 
display that glorifies Him, to share in some experi- 
ence out of which flashes the splendour of His di- 
vinity. It may be some precious personal experi- 
ence, some wonderful conversion, some wide 
sweeping revival, some outward display of the 
progress of the kingdom, some spectacular revela- 
tion of the glory of the Church, some demonstra- 
tion of the power of Christian civilization, some 
prophetic foretoken of the new age. 

As we look and listen, we glorify the hour and 
exalt the scene. We say: " It is good to be here." 
We recite the splendours of the Church, the power 
of its message, the sweep of its influence, the wis- 
dom of its creeds. We proclaim the kingdom. 
We talk about a new age of fraternalism. We 
discuss the brotherhood of man, and sing of an era 
of peace, and say: " It is great, it is good, it is 
glorious to be alive. Let us build." 

Amid it all, we sometimes forget that quiet fig- 



130 JESUS ONLY 

ure on the far horizon, the One Who came lonely 
and portionless to His own, and His own received 
Him not, the Son of Man Who had not where to 
lay His head. He hung on the cross and was 
wounded for our transgression. Amid all the splen- 
dours and triumphs of the day, amid the power 
and wealth, the pomp and progress of the Church, 
we sometimes forget Jesus. We are so fascinated 
by the frame we fail to see the picture. We are 
so absorbed with His garments that we fail to look 
into His face. We are so fascinated by the light 
that we forget the sun and imagine that the glory 
of the Gospel is in its manifestation, its displays 
and achievements. 

But back of all is Jesus only. He has brought 
it to pass. It is but a glimpse of what is potential 
in the lowly, suffering Saviour. Take all away 
and leave us Jesus and nothing is lost. Tear down 
the Church, wipe out civilization, reverse every 
step of progress for the last nineteen hundred 
years, but leave Christ, and the world will begin 
afresh its climb out of sin. All will be restored, 
for there was a time when Christ was all. There 
were no mighty denominations, no widespread 
evangelizing forces, no Christian schools and print- 
ing presses and hospitals, no Christian nations con- 
quering in the sign of the cross, no treasures of art 
and literature stamped with the influence of Chris- 
tianity, but just the lowly, lonely Christ hanging 
there on the cross, thorn-crowned, spear-torn, nail- 



JESUS ONLY 131 

driven, between two thieves, while the world went 
by wagging its head and saying: "He saved others ; 
himself he cannot save." There was just Jesus 
only. But He is the divinity at the heart of it all. 
He produced it. It was potential within Him. He 
was the one man in human history who was His 
message. 

Let us not forget Jesus in our admiration of 
what His teachings and influence have done in the 
world. Let us not lose His faith in our wonder of 
His work. Let us not think more of the transfigu- 
ration than we do of Christ Himself. We must 
not count His robe dearer than His Person, nor 
value relics higher than His Presence, nor exalt 
systems and sects and creeds and rituals or even 
the Church itself, above the living Christ. 

Christ is Christianity. Take Him away, and 
there is nothing left. The Church collapses. The 
cult dies, and civilization withers. We succeed 
only as our work reveals, honours, exalts and glori- 
fies Him. The great thing about a sermon is the 
revelation of Christ it may contain. It may be 
eloquent or plain, but if Christ is there, it will cast 
a spell. It is not the place, but the Christ in the 
place, that makes it holy. It may be a stately tem- 
ple or a plain chapel or a spot in the open by the 
riverside, but if Christ is there, heaven brushes 
earth. Christ is Christianity. "And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto 
me." No wonder the sole memorial of our faith 
is the remembrance of Jesus. 



132 JESUS ONLY 

The Vision of the Sacrament 

The vision of the sacrament is Jesus only. That 
night long ago as He gathered around the table 
with His disciples, He instituted the simple feast 
and said: " Do this in remembrance of me." He 
seemed to say: " Whenever you keep the supper, I 
want you to think of me. I want your devotion to 
be not the Church, not the system, not the ritual 
nor the cause, not the progress and triumph of the 
faith. As you gather in the holy hush of the 
communion hour, my prayer is that you may see 
no man save Jesus only with yourselves." This 
is what these symbols are saying. It is a plain 
feast, just a table and some plates and cups, some 
pieces of bread and a chalice of wine. The ap- 
pointments are bare. They are not impressive, for 
they must not attract attention to themselves. We 
must see no man save Jesus only. We must go 
back to that figure on the cross. We must think 
of His love and feel His holy presence,, then 
heaven is here. 

" Jesus only with themselves." With you, with 
me ! Surely there can never be a dull day if that 
be our lot. Jesus is enough. He saves, inspires, 
directs, sustains, enriches, shares, and when work 
is over, He rewards. After toil is finished it is 
enough if at the end of the journey in the haze of 
the twilight we shall see Jesus only, and hear Him 
say: " Well done, welcome home ! " 



JESUS ONLY 133 

As we gather around the table, may this come to 
pass. May the pomp and circumstance of religion 
retire into the shadows, and may the face and form 
of the sinners' Friend discover themselves to our 
faith. May we see no man save Jesus only with 
ourselves ! 



ll 



XVIII 
" OF ME " 

" This do in remembrance of me." — Luke 22 : 19. 

WHY did Christ add the last two words — 
" of me " ? Why not say: " This do in 
remembrance," and let it stand at that? 

It would have been a sweet and privileged medi- 
tation just to remember, just to sit and muse while 
memory brought the old days back, just to think of 
the times that were gone, of the days when they 
were fishermen, of that hour when He called them 
and they left all and followed Him, of those three 
wonderful years of fellowship, of their first mis- 
sionary journey and of the way they came back to 
Him flushed with success and radiant with the 
knowledge of the new power that had come. Did 
ever men have such eventful years ? It would have 
been great just to remember. 

This is what some of us do at communion. We 
remember. We recall the days that are gone. We 
think of the old associations in the church we love. 
We seem to see about us the people who used to sit 
in the pews and the minister who once stood in the 
pulpit. We remember ourselves, our falls, our 

*34 



"OF ME" 135 

struggles, our blunders. We recall the periods of 
great spiritual awakening which star the path. It 
is heavenly thus to sit under the spell of sacred 
memory. 

But this is not what Christ says. He says: 
" This do in remembrance of me." He claims our 
attention. He seems to say: "I want you to be 
absorbed with me, not with thoughts of yourselves, 
of your church, of your preacher and his sermon, 
but of me." He does not say that He wants us 
to remember something about Him, to recall His 
words, His work, His sufferings. Of course there 
is a sense in which all these crowd in as we think 
of Him. But He is more than any sermon He 
ever preached or any miracle He ever wrought, and 
He says: "Remember me." The personality of 
Christ is the picture on which faith is to dwell in 
the sacrament. 

The Egotism of Jesus 

Jesus was the greatest egotist the world has ever 
known. One needs but to recall some of His 
teachings to be convinced of this. He said: 
" Whosoever believeth in me shall be saved." He 
brushes aside all others as pretenders, and claims 
that He, and He alone, is Saviour. 

He says: " I am the way, the truth and the life. 
No man cometh unto the Father but by me." He 
sends all systems and creeds and organizations and 
cults to the rear, and fills their places with Him- 



136 "OF ME" 

self. He claims that He, and He alone, has the 
power to introduce men to God. He is the only 
way, and he that climbeth up some other way is a 
thief and a robber. 

Hear Him as He takes the world into His heart, 
and says : " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Recite the 
travail of the world. Think of its pain and agony, 
of its remorse and bitter disappointment, of all its 
sorrow and tears. How can such sickness ever be 
healed? For Christ it is easy. He says: "Just 
come to me, and your tired hearts will be cured." 

He assumes the power to forgive sin. He says : 
" The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive 
sin." He is claiming sinless perfection, for if He 
forgives sin, He does not commit it. He asks: 
" Lovest thou me?" and makes devotion to Him- 
self the supreme motive in Christian service. 

Christianity is the religion of a Person, — not of 
a ritual or a cult or a system, but of a Person. 
People are religious not as they are orthodox, not 
as they recite a liturgy, not as they discharge cer- 
tain duties and subscribe to certain views, but as 
they are related to Jesus. 

Then Christ is more than a mere man. It would 
be blasphemy for a mere man to say what Christ 
says. It would be worse than a farce for the best 
of men to claim what Christ claims. It would be 
more than ridiculous for them to profess to do 
what Christ does. But He performs what He 



"OF ME" 137 

proposes. His promises are worth their face value. 
Christ makes good. 

His is the egotism of a God. It does not offend 
us. It would be strange if, being what He is, He 
should say less. Jesus assumed His godhood. 
He did not claim it, because such claim was unnec- 
essary. In so far as saving Himself went, He emp- 
tied Himself of His godhood, because He came to 
live a real human life, to meet trial as we must 
meet it, and to be tempted in all points like as we 
are. But let us not misunderstand Him. This 
does not mean that Christ takes a second place. 

The Goal of Religion 

Jesus is the goal of religion. He comes first. 
He is the chief est among ten thousand and the one 
altogether lovely. Perhaps you are trying to be 
religious. What do you mean by it? What 
thought is in your mind and what plan are you 
following to accomplish your desire ? You attend 
church, but why ? You contribute your money to 
good causes, but why? To whom are you making 
your gifts ? To the church ? To humanity ? Per- 
haps you teach a class in the Sunday-school, or 
help at the mission, or are a worker at the settle- 
ment. For whom are you doing all this? Ana- 
lyze your religion. Perhaps much of it never gets 
to Christ at all. 

Many of the things we do we do simply because 
we like to do them. The service is congenial. 



138 "OF ME" 

Perhaps it makes us feel important It classifies 
us with people who are decent and generous and 
respectable. We are fond of the church. We 
want it to make a good record. We would like to 
meet the expectations which the world has of us. 
Society might call us mean were we to decline. 
And all of this is very nice, in a way, but it 
is not being a Christian. A pagan can go this 
far. 

Christ says: "I want you to do it for me. 
When you help a lame man, I want you to be think- 
ing not so much of him, but of me. When you are 
engaged in Christian service, I would have your 
mind filled with thoughts not so much of the church 
or of the class as of me. When you give your 
money, back of the gift I would have you remem- 
ber not merely the community or the heathen, or 
even my servant the missionary, but I want you to 
remember me, your Saviour." 

Does Christ stand out before us? Is He su- 
preme ? Have we thought that what we were do- 
ing, we were doing for Him, and that when we 
failed to do, it was not the people we hurt, nor 
the church, but were driving the nails into the 
hands of Christ? Have you ever heard Him cry 
out as you pressed down the thorns? No. His 
pale lips speak no word. But if we could see the 
unseen, we might see what Peter saw that night at 
the trial when, as he denied Him, he turned and 
saw Jesus. We might hear what John heard as 



"OF ME" 139 

He listened to his Master that awful night before 
Pilate. 

Let us readjust our motives here at the com- 
munion table. What is the place we give Christ? 
In our great campaigns for the kingdom, what 
motive drives us on? Is it church pride, or de- 
nominational loyalty, or the honour that attaches 
to success, or is it all for Him? 

"This do in remembrance of me." That will 
sustain us. It will make the difficult easy. It will 
keep us sweet when we are tempted to be bitter, y 
It will enable us to see the best in others, and it will 
enable us to rejoice in suffering. I have heard of 
a young man who came to America from a nation 
to whom we send the missionaries. He had heard 
of Jesus, and had learned to love Him. He wanted 
to fit himself for Christian service to his own na- 
tion. Without means, he was working his passage 
in the stifling hold of the ship as a stoker, but he 
said the thing that sustained him was, in the midst 
of the awful heat and dirt of that long passage, 
that it was for Christ. * 

It is our devotion to Jesus that will shape the 
verdict at last. " I was in prison and ye came unto 
me." Maybe we were not always conscious that 
He was there, but it was not for the prisoner, it 
was for the Christ that we went. It was in His 
name that we gave a cup of water to a thirsty dis- 
ciple. It was because we knew and loved Jesus 
that we gave a lift to the hurt man on the highway, 



140 "OF MB" 

and the Judge is saying: " Inasmuch as ye did it 
unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye did 
it unto me." 

" This do in remembrance of me." May we see 
Him as we gather around the table. In the holy 
hush of communion, for us may it be Jesus, only 
Jesus. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly ! 



XIX 

THE PROGRAM OF THE UPPER ROOM 

" Ye are witnesses of these things." — Luke 24 : 48. 

THE place was the upper chamber at Jeru- 
salem. It was the first cathedral of the 
Christian Church. There was no altar, 
no choir, no nave, no crucifix. It was without 
Gothic arches and steepled splendour. There were 
just the four bare walls of a common room, but 
there never was built a house that held more of 
God than that plain room. It was the room where 
the Holy Supper was instituted, where Christ's dis- 
ciples made their home after they had lost their 
Master. It was the room in which the prayer- 
meeting was held which preceded Pentecost, when 
the Holy Spirit descended in power and the gift of 
tongues was bestowed. There more than once the 
risen Christ showed Himself to His friends. Such 
is the place. 

The people in this room consist of Jesus and ten 
men, Thomas the doubter being absent. They are 
the friends who had followed Christ through the 
three strange and eventful years of His earthly 
ministry, but times have changed. They have seen 

141 



142 THE PROGRAM OP THE UPPER ROOM 

Him arrested and crucified. They have watched 
Him stagger down the road tinder the load of a 
cross. They have seen the soldiers nail Him to the 
tree, and have heard His cries from the cross. 
They have watched Him die, and they have laid 
His body in the tomb. Yet here He is with them 
again. He is risen. They cannot doubt it. He 
shows them the print of the nails. He eats with 
them. Their Master has come back. And those 
men are all a-tremble with the ecstasy of the hour. 

The two disciples who saw Him in the breaking 
of the bread at Emmaus have told their strange 
story, and even while they tell it, Jesus is there in 
the room with them again, with the old look in His 
face, and the voice they love so well has once more 
spoken peace. That has thrilled them. What 
care they now for the great hostile world whose 
tides of unbelief and persecution break and beat 
outside? The door is shut, and within is Christ. 
What care they for the soldiers and the priests and 
the excited mob? The world may cry: " Crucify 
him ! " They may nail Him to the cross and seal 
His sepulchre and station a guard, but they cannot 
keep Christ in the tomb. What do these friends 
of Christ care now for the world ? 

Ah, but they must care. This is their mission. 
They must care for the cold, hostile, persecuting 
world. Next to their Lord, there is nothing they 
must care for quite so much. They must not care 
for themselves. They must not care for ease or 



THE PROGRAM OF THE UPPER ROOM 143 

peace or joy, nor count life dear. They must hold 
all cheap, that they may bless the world God loved 
and Christ came to save. 

And so the mystical must become practical. The 
ecstasy must translate itself into service. Privi- 
lege must pack itself into power. This is the law 
of the kingdom. It was so with the demoniac res- 
cued from the tomb. It was the purpose of that 
wonderful experience on the Mount of Transfigu- 
ration. It was the message to Mary in the garden 
that Easter morn. And it is the message here in 
the upper room. The needy world waits outside 
the door and they must plan to save the lost. 
There are rooms in which the destiny of nations is 
decided, and the map of earth changed. There in 
the upper room it was the destiny of a race that 
was involved. 

How is the world to be saved? What shall be 
the program ? How shall the campaign be planned ? 
Christ is going away, but His work must go on. 
There in that room is to be formulated the scheme 
which is to issue in world redemption. From the 
upper room is to go forth the power which is to 
change the world. Through that door directly 
will pass a force incarnated in the personalities of 
eleven men that will shake down every despotism, 
terminate every tyranny, overthrow the barriers of 
hate, wipe out every line of caste, cure every 
wound, comfort every sorrow, and atone for every 
sin. 



144 THE PKOGKAM OF THE UPPER ROOM 

It is a stupendous undertaking. The world is 
to crown Christ King. The cross must triumph. 
The Sermon on the Mount must be translated into 
practice. It means the mightiest upheaval in hu- 
man history. The forces of evil are to be routed, 
and civilization is to be built on the Golden Rule. 
This is the task. Already it has partially been ac- 
complished. All the program of world evangeli- 
zation is potential in that upper room where ten 
men tarry under the spell of a resurrected Christ. 

Christ announced the program. He sums it up 
in a single line. " Ye are witnesses of these 
things." That was all. They were to file out of 
that room into the world and become witnesses. 
Nothing could be more practical. They were to 
translate the mystical. They were to harness the 
ecstasy. They were to live out the peace. And 
they did. In the gray dawn of the day of service 
they opened the door of the upper room and al- 
lowed the tides of the hostile world to break over 
them. They faced the battle line and gave their 
testimony. They laid down their lives. But it was 
victory. 

Witnesses 
The program of the upper room is for Christ's 
disciples to be witnesses. It is for those who have 
sat at Jesus' feet and have learned of Him to tell 
what they have learned. It is for those who have 
heard it to publish the good news. It is for those 



THE PROGRAM OF THE UPPER ROOM 145 

who have become partakers of the Gospel to pro- 
claim the message. That is all. Could anything 
be simpler? Men were to be saved by believing. 
But how can they believe on Him of Whom they 
have not heard ? 

The program of the upper room was not for the 
disciples to raise an army and unsheath the sword 
and appeal to force. No world power is men- 
tioned. There is not a word about money or schol- 
arship or influence or place. They had none of 
this. They were just to be witnesses. 

The program was not that they should go forth 
to answer the arguments of their foes or to reply to 
the criticism of those who doubted or despised 
their call. They were not asked to explain away 
the difficulties nor to soften the hardships involved 
in discipleship. They were to be neither judge nor 
jury nor advocate, but just witnesses. 

They were not asked to organize themselves into 
an institution in order to do the work. They were 
not even told to found a church. Of course, the 
church would come. But it would come as a by- 
product of witnessing. Nothing is said about a 
hierarchy or a priesthood. Many things have been 
added to the program since that hour in the upper 
room, some of which are useful, but in the original 
there was nothing but witnessing. 

It seemed too simple. It sounded inadequate. 
It looked as though the plan were doomed to fail- 
ure. What did the world care for witnesses? It 



146 THE PEOGEAM OP THE UPPEE EOOM 

would despise them and impeach them and silence 
them. It would trample on their testimony. It 
would heap ridicule on their efforts. The world 
would not listen. But Christ does not revise. He 
says: "Ye are witnesses of these things. ,, And 
He lets it stand at that. On this He stakes His 
cause. He went into battle with neither army nor 
ammunition nor equipment, with eleven men for 
His followers, who had nothing in the world but 
the story of their faith in their Leader. 

This is still the program. Since that night 
long ago in the upper room, we have gotten much 
together. Earth is filled with great churches. The 
Church is rich and learned and influential. The 
foremost nations of the world call themselves 
Christian. Yet these are not the things that win. 
The program of victory is still the program of the 
upper room. The world is saved only as Christ's 
disciples become His witnesses. It is here the tide 
turns. This is all Christ asks of us, and nothing 
can take its place. " Ye are witnesses of these 
things." 

The important thing is to be a witness. I may 
be a church member, but if I am not a witness, I 
am a failure. The big thing is not my denomina- 
tion, my contribution, my activities, my knowledge 
of theology, my position in the church or in the 
world, but my testimony. Has the world ever 
thought enough of my religious life to call me to 
the witness stand ? 



THE PROGRAM OP THE UPPER ROOM 147 

The Assets of a Witness 
To be a witness one must have an experience. 
He must know what he knows. It is not enough 
for him to know what some one else knows. It 
will not answer for him to report what others say 
they have heard or seen or felt. He must himself 
have seen and heard and felt. He must know 
Jesus in the forgiveness of his sins. An uncon- 
verted man may hold office in the church. He 
may be a generous contributor of his means. He 
may found charities and philanthropies and sup- 
port a missionary. He may teach in the Sunday- 
school. He may even be a preacher of the Gospel. 
He may do any number of good things. But he 
cannot get into the program of the upper room. 
To do that, he must have an experience. He must 
be converted himself and be able to say: "I 
know!" 

His testimony must be specific. It is not enough 
for him to tell where he lives, to announce his na- 
tionality, his colour, his condition. It will not suf- 
fice for him to tell what he knows about agricul- 
ture or science or lawmaking. The mission of the 
Church is definite. The kingdom is not meat and 
drink. It is not an economic paradise that Jesus 
came to establish. The Church is not asked to 
give its testimony on every new ripple that shows 
on the sea of human life. It is to tell what it 
knows about Christ, of His saving power, of His 
ability to cure sin. 



148 THE PROGRAM OF THE UPPER ROOM 

If our testimony is to be credible, our character 
must be in harmony with the truth we preach. It 
must certify that we are trustworthy. A witness 
must be faithful. This is preeminently true when 
it comes to religion. We must be what we pro- 
claim. We must possess, and not merely profess. 
Christ's stamp must be on us. The world will not 
listen to a hypocrite or a pretender. 

Evidence 

We are witnesses of " these things." What 
things? They are the things mentioned in the 
forty-sixth and forty-seventh verses of the chap- 
ter. They are three in number. 

We are to testify to the sufferings of Christ. 
This is the first thing the world needs to know. 
It must learn that He suffered. It must stop at 
the cross. It must discover that He laid down His 
life for sinners. We are to go on the witness 
stand to prove that Calvary is a reality. How? 
Not by saying, but by being. We must live the 
cross. Paul declared that he filled up the suffer- 
ings of Christ, and that he bore in his body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus. Whatever happened to 
Christ must happen to His followers. We must 
take up our cross and follow Him. We must be 
crucified with Him. Talk is cheap. It convinces 
no one. But to live the cross, — that is unanswer- 
able. 

We must testify to the resurrection of Christ. 



THE PEOGEAM OF THE UPPEE EOOM 149 

The world also needs to know that Christ rose 
from the dead. This is the seal and proof of all 
He taught. It was the great event. How are we 
to testify to the resurrection? We must do more 
than say that He rose. It is not enough to sing an 
Easter song or hold an Easter service. Christ 
must be risen in us. The soul must emerge from 
the tomb of sin and selfishness. We must experi- 
ence the resurrection. That was the glorious thing 
about the woman who broke her alabaster box on 
Christ. She was risen. The world listens not so 
much to our song as to us. If Christ is risen in 
me the hope of glory, that is evidence. 

We must testify to repentance and remission of 
sins in His name. This is the good news the 
world is waiting to hear from those men who are 
issuing from the upper room. They were not 
waiting to learn some new theory of science or the 
latest market quotations or the best method of 
handling the social evil, but how sin could be cured 
and an entrance made into the kingdom of right- 
eousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. 
How were they to furnish such testimony? It 
was not enough to believe it for themselves. They 
must believe it and experience it, but they must also 
proclaim it. They must see that everybody hears 
it. They must go into all the world and preach the 
Gospel to every creature. They must become her- 
alds, ambassadors, living incarnations of the holy 
evangel. 



150 THE PEOGEAM OF THE UPPEE EOOM 

The Campaign 

Such was the program of the upper room. As 
that little apostolic group passed out, this is what 
they went to do. After Pentecost, they began to 
preach, — not a system, not a dogma, but evidence. 
They testified to the thing they knew. As they 
did so, the barriers fell away and the cross was tri- 
umphant. 

This is our business as Christians. The com- 
munion will remind us of this. In our imagina- 
tion we return to the upper room, and there the old 
program greets us. We are witnesses of these 
things, in our own town, in our own home. In 
the office, the factory, on the street, on the golf 
links, in our social recreations, in our business re- 
lations, wherever we are, we are to be witnesses. 

Christ has left His work with us. His cause 
stands or falls, wins or fails, with our testimony. 
The world judges the Saviour by us. It is not a 
case of the inspiration of the Bible or of the mir- 
acles, or of the Church. It is a case of the Chris- 
tian, of whether he is a good or bad witness. 

It is great to be faithful. Now we are in the 
upper room. To-morrow we shall be in the world, 
and the salvation of the world will depend on us. 
It is a tremendous responsibility. It is an impos- 
sible task that is assigned us. It throws us back 
on God. With Him the impossible becomes pos- 
sible. Oh, to catch the spirit of those men in the 
upper room, and of Christ's true friends who in 
every age have turned the tide ! 



XX 

INSIDE THE CUP 

"For this is my blood of the new testament, which is 
shed for many for the remission of sins/' — Matthew 26 : 28. 

BY " inside the cup " I am not referring to 
the engaging book with this title which 
appeared a few years ago and created 
something of a sensation, nor to the picture which 
films the story of the book, although there is much 
in both to stir the conscience and make us stop and 
ask whether we are true representatives of the 
meek and lowly Jesus Who cared not for caste nor 
class, but Who loved humanity with such passion 
that He poured out His life on Calvary's cross. 

By " inside the cup " I mean the contents of the 
communion cup which Christ held in His hand that 
fateful night in the upper room, as He blessed the 
cup and passed it to His disciples, saying: " Drink 
ye all of it." What did Christ mean? What was 
inside the cup ? 

There was some passover wine made of the 
grapes which had ripened on the hillside yonder in 
the summer sun. Whether it was fermented or 
unfermented wine we are not told. Controversies 
have raged around the question. Books have been 
written on the subject. It is not, however, a ques- 

151 



152 INSIDE THE CUP 

tion of relatively great importance. There are 
some so concerned for the wine in the cup that they 
would have none of the sacramental symbol left 
unused lest there should be the sacrilege of a holy 
thing. This, too, is also a matter not essential. 
Had it been, Christ would probably have charged 
His disciples to such caution at the institution of 
the Supper. 

The Saviour's atonement was inside the cup. 
We are coming to something vastly important now. 
" For this is my blood of the new testament which 
is shed for many for the remission of sins. ,, He 
was speaking of His passion. The wine symbol- 
izes the blood shed on the cross. The cup is the 
memorial of His sufferings and death. It is the 
cup of sacrifice, the chalice of forgiveness, the gob- 
let of redemption. It is this that He holds out to 
those men at the table, as He passes the cup. Let 
us think of this as we commune. As we touch our 
lips to the cup, we are looking down on the Saviour 
Who died that we might be forgiven, Whose blood 
was shed for the remission of sins, in Whose blood 
the pilgrim hosts wash their robes and make them 
white ; and so cleansing is the power of this blood 
that, " though our sins be as scarlet, they shall be 
as white as snow." 

But this is not all that is inside the cup. Those 
for whom Christ died are there. How many are 
there, and of what classes ? Who was Christ think- 
ing about when He said His blood was shed for 



INSIDE THE CUP 153 

many* Did He mean to include only the church 
people., the good, the worthy, the cultured and ^he 
respectable ? He did not stop with these on other 
occasions. Why should He narrow Himself here ? 
There are beggars inside the cup. The lepers are 
there, the lame, the halt, and the blind. Look at 
them. They are moving around inside the cup. 
They are lifting wan faces. They are holding up 
their hands. They are making prayers. For Jesus 
came to call not the righteous, but sinners, to re- 
pentance, and He said : " Other sheep I have which 
are not of this fold." 

He says that His blood was shed for many. 
Why not for all? What a glorious thing if He 
had said all ! I think He wanted to say it, but He 
knew that some would reject it. Perhaps He was 
thinking of Judas. He cannot say all, but He 
does say many. He means that all who come will 
be received. There is enough for all, and He is 
able to save unto the uttermost all who come unto 
God through Him. But some will decline to come. 
They will exclude themselves. It is strange that 
they should, but every day we see them doing this. 
Yet the " many " remains in the line. Widen out 
Christ's phrase. There is a multitude no man can 
number. 

Inside the cup are some from all nations. Christ 
has a constituency from every nationality. His 
humanity is racial. He is the desire of nations. 
Only in Him is found what every nation desires to 



154 INSIDE THE CUP 

realize. Oh, that they could see it ! What America 
needs is Christ. What China and Japan need is 
Christ. What white man and black man and yel- 
low man need is the Son of Man. " I shall be sat- 
isfied when I awake in thy likeness." This is why 
He said: " Go ye into all the world and preach the 
gospel to every creature." He was thinking of all 
of them when He said it, of high and low, rich and 
poor, publican and sinner, troubled and erring. He 
was thinking of the criminal and the street-walker, 
rulers and slaves. All are there inside the cup. 
It is the world's melting-pot. There in the com- 
munion cup our common humanity mingles, be- 
cause there our Friend meets us. He died for all, 
and calls us all His friends. He says: " All ye are 
brethren." 

Can it be that we have withheld the cup from 
any whom Christ placed inside ? If they are to find 
Him, they must first know Him. How shall they 
believe in Him of Whom they have not heard, and 
how shall they hear without a preacher? Have we 
failed to make Him known? Have we kept out 
some whom Christ wants in, some for whom He 
died, some who have as much right there as we, 
some for whom He is waiting, waiting to give 
them remission of sins, but they have not received 
it because the knowledge has stopped in us ? 

Let us think of them as we come to communion. 
Let us think of Him and of our high privileges in 
Him. It is a blessed thing to sit at the table and 



INSIDE THE CUP 155 

meditate on His wondrous love. But I wonder if, 
as He looks down upon us, He may not be thinking 
of some who are not His? He misses them. 
Some are not here because they never had a chance. 
They had no chance because some who knew failed 
to let them know that there is room, and that they 
are expected. It is strange that we should forget 
at the table where the one thing He asks is that 
we remember. 

The communion was being observed in a great 
church. The emblems had been passed. Follow- 
ing a custom sometimes practiced, the minister was 
asking: " Have any been omitted? " And a woman 
who had communed said it seemed to her that as 
she heard the question, hundreds of women began 
to arise from the countries of the earth, from 
China, and Africa, and India, and Korea, and 
Japan, and as they stood up, they seemed to cry 
out: " Yes, we have been omitted. None has ever 
broken to us the bread of life." 

" Sudden before my inward open vision 
Millions of faces crowded up to view, 
Sad eyes that said : ' For us is no provision, 
Give us your Saviour, too/ 

" ' Give us,' they cry, ' your cup of consolation, 
Never to our outreaching hands 'tis passed ; 
We long for the Desire of every nation, 
And oh, we die so fast ! ' " 



XXI 
WHERE SUFFERING AND GLORY BLEND 

"// so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also 
glorified together." — Romans 8: 17. 

THIS verse takes us to the place where suf- 
fering and glory blend. 
Suffering is a thing we shun. Every- 
body runs away from it. Who wants to suffer? 
We hide out for fear of meeting the dread thing 
on life's road. We build barriers and construct 
fortifications, but suffering laughs at us. It 
brushes aside all our defenses. It runs us down. 
It springs from ambush. It is deaf to our cries 
and blind to our piteous plight. We cannot escape 
suffering. Some it smites with physical pain, some 
with an anguished mind, some with discourage- 
ment and despair, some with the agony of a broken 
heart. Somewhere, sometime on every life suf- 
fering makes its mark. 

Glory is the thing we seek. Everybody is run- 
ning after it. Everybody wants glory of some 
kind. There are many kinds of glory, — the glory 
of place, of power, of culture, of character, of 
skill, of heroism, of sacrifice, of love, of unselfish- 
ness. There is the glory of the soldier, the states- 

156 



WHEBE SUFFEKING AND GLOEY BLEND 157 

man, the philanthropist, the poet, the artist, the 
musician. Glory has many garbs, but whatever its 
garment, it is the thing everybody is after. But it 
is elusive. It hides out. It slips away and leaves 
us in the gloom. 

Suffering and glory ! The one thing all seek and 
the one thing all shun ! We locate them far apart, 
but this line from Paul's letter to the Romans 
seems to say: "If you will listen to me, I will 
show you how suffering and glory meet. I will 
take you to the place where they blend and become 
one. If you will harken to my voice and receive 
what I offer, you will find suffering transfigured 
and glory acquired. " For if so be that we suffer 
with him, we shall also be glorified with him." 

Glory Costs Suffering 

We get a glimpse of this as we look about us in 
the world. It shows itself in nature. There was 
never a harvest but had to pay the price of pain 
and travail, never a dawn but had to drag itself out 
of the darkness of night, never a victory but had 
the muck of slaughter on its trail, never a deed of 
heroism but somebody had to suffer. Glory is not 
cheap. It is not a kind of ripe fruit which lazy 
hands may pluck from low-hanging branches of an 
idle day. Glory camps on the heights. It is a cliff 
dweller. It costs, and the kind of coin in which 
payment must be made is stamped with suffering. 



158 WHEEE SUFFEEING AND GLOEY BLEND 

There is a place where we get more than a 
glimpse of the fact that glory costs suffering, — 
where we get a demonstration. There is a place 
where this great truth is proclaimed. It is at the 
cross. "If so be that we suffer with him, that we 
may be also glorified together." Calvary is the 
story of suffering. Jesus was the great sufferer. 
Never was there pain like His. He drank the 
bitter cup to its dregs. He dwelt in the gloom 
which hovers about the caverns of death. His 
heart was anguished with a loneliness which 
seemed to separate Him from God, but in all this 
He was paying the price for the glory of becoming 
the world's Redeemer. He suffered in order that 
He might save. Had He never suffered, He could 
never save. This is the price He paid. At Calvary 
glory cost suffering. 

Suffering Produces Glory 
We get a suggestion, a glimpse of this, too, as 
we look out on the world about us. Nature also 
discloses it in the frost which pulverizes the soil 
for the new sowing, in the thunderbolt which 
sweetens and purines the air, in the protesting 
nerves which ring the danger signals in our flesh 
against approaching peril, in those suffering moods 
of the soul by which human nature is enriched 
with a gentler and a wider sympathy. Suffering 
produces glory. You can see it in the refiner's pot 
where dross is consumed and gold is refined. You 



WHEBE SUFFERING AND GLORY BLEND 159 

can see it on the potter's wheel where dull clay is 
shaped into use and beauty. You can see it under 
the hand of the lapidarian as the light sparkles and 
flashes from the face of a gem, and you can see it 
in the great loom of time which weaves a fabric 
we call life. Suffering produces glory. Glory is 
the finished product of suffering. 

But there is a place where we get more than a 
glimpse, where we get a demonstraton. There is 
a place where it is proclaimed. It is at the cross, 
the cross of Calvary. The cross is the story of 
Christ's victory. It tells us not merely that He 
suffered. It was where He accomplished His 
dream. As He hung there in the darkness, He saw 
the light He saw past the gaunt outlines of the 
accursed tree, beyond His persecuters, beyond the 
nails and thorns and loneliness. He saw beyond 
the veil into the glory. He saw the crown of con- 
quest and the throne of dominion and the faces of 
friends, and He heard the triumph song. " He 
saw of the travail of his soul and was satisfied." 
And so this again is where suffering and glory 
blend, — there where a Man laid down His life for 
a cause, and where along a road that was steep and 
rough He climbed to the sun-kissed peaks, and 
where on a cross that was lonely He hung until 
the night was gone, and where in a tomb that was 
sealed and guarded He nursed His hope till Easter 
morning rolled the stone away and the angels said: 
" He is risen." 



160 WHEKE SUFFERING AND GLOEY BLEND 

The Message of the Sacrament 

The holy sacrament speaks to us of suffering, — 
not merely of our sufferings, but of the Saviour's 
suffering. It tells us of One Who bore on His 
great heart all the sufferings of the world, Who 
carried on His shoulder all the burdens of man- 
kind, and Who as He took His lot tasted death for 
every man. 

It also speaks to us of glory, — not of a glory 
that is counterfeit, not of the glory of place and 
pomp and power, not of the gleam of mortal 
triumph, but of eternal glory, of the glory which 
Christ had with the Father before the world was. 
It speaks to us of a spiritual glory that can never 
be dulled nor dimmed nor diminished. 

And then the communion tells us where these 
two things blend. It tells us that glory costs suf- 
fering and that suffering produces glory, and it de- 
clares that for those who are with Him the chasm 
between glory and suffering disappears. There is 
no promise or hope just to naked suffering. It is 
to those who suffer with Him. Our sufferings 
must be with Christ. We must be His comrades, 
His companions. It is when we are in fellowship 
with Him that suffering is transfigured, and such 
fellowship is within our reach, for Jesus says: 
" Let us suffer together that we may be also glori- 
fied together." This is what He means when He 
says : " Take my yoke upon you." He would lead 



WHERE SUFFERING AND GLORY BLEND 161 

us out where the thing we shun becomes the thing 
we seek, and where our fears are changed to hope. 
Let us not be afraid of suffering, for if we suffer 
with Him we shall also be glorified together. 
When pain and anguish and sorrow break on us, 
let us think of Him Who stands beside us in the 
shadows and suffers, too. Let us remember that 
it pleased God to make the Captain of our salva- 
tion perfect through suffering, and know that suf- 
fering can have no other mission for those in fel- 
lowship with Christ. It is to make us perfect. 
When we suffer, it is that our ministry may be 
larger, sweeter, holier. " I have called thee to 
suffer," was Christ's message to Paul. It was not 
a call to a dwarfed and diminishing, but to an en- 
larged and ever-increasing service. Thus let us 
wait for the morning. For the morning cometh. 
Let us wait for the cloud of suffering to change to 
gold. You have seen clouds do that yonder across 
the western hills at sunset. You have watched the 
sullen sky sheathed in gray and gloom change and 
flame into golden glory. It is a picture of what 
comes to those who suffer with Him. " For I 
reckon that the sufferings of this present time are 
not worthy to be compared with the glory that 
shall be revealed in us." " For these light afflictions 
which are but for a moment shall work out for us a 
far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." 
And so for all who tarry at the cross and sit at the 
table, for all who drink of His cup and are bap- 
tized with His baptism, suffering and glory blend. 



XXII 

FROM THE COMMUNION TABLE 
TO PERJURY 

"// / should die with thee, I will not deny thee in any 
wise. Likewise said they all." — Mark 14 : 31. 

THIS is a great oath of fealty to Christ. 
It is a mighty vow of allegiance, a sub- 
lime declaration of unfaltering faith and 
steadfast devotion. 

Jesus seems despondent. He is on the verge of 
Calvary. He is entering upon a night of agony. 
He is passing through the gate into Gethsemane. 
Speaking to His disciples about the loneliness that 
will soon be upon Him, He tells them that they 
will leave Him. They will smite the shepherd and 
the sheep will be scattered. There is a tinge of 
melancholy dejection to His words as He predicts 
the desertion of His disciples. 

It was then that Simon Peter took a great oath, 
and swore undying attachment to Christ. " If I 
should die with thee, I will not deny thee in any 
wise." Peter was never greater than then. He 
was on the summit of heroic love. If only he 
could live there always and be as true, as steadfast, 
and as outspoken in his loyalty, what a power he 
would be ! 

He meant it. Do not for a moment think he was 

162 



THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PEEJTJEY 163 

pretending. What he said is more than mere 
words. Peter had his faults, but hypocrisy was not 
one of them. He meant all that he said. His 
heart was fixed, and he was ready then and there 
to die for Christ. 

Nevertheless, he broke his oath, and perjured 
himself. It was done under the most humiliating 
circumstances. Looked at in the later happenings 
of that awful night, what he said was worse than 
a boast. It became the broken vow of a perjurer, 
and stands midway between the hour of holiest 
privilege and shameful denial. 

The Story 

Christ had just instituted the Holy Supper. 
There in the upper room He was gathered with 
His disciples on the fateful night. It w r as the last 
hour of placid, unbroken fellowship before the 
storm. In His wonderful discourse He had un- 
veiled to them His heart. He had offered the in- 
tercessory prayer. How near they seemed to each 
other then, and how close to God ! Then came the 
bread and the cup of remembrance, and then the 
hymn, and now they are on their way to the Mount 
of Olives. 

It was the first communion in the history of the 
Church, the first celebration of the feast that was 
to be kept over and over again. These men have 
shared it, have looked upon the very face of Christ, 
have heard His voice in the sacrament, have seen 



164 THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PERJURY 

Him touch and bless the emblems. Surely they 
can never pass from a scene so holy but to a serv- 
ice sacred and divine. No wonder they swear al- 
legiance and say they are ready to die for Him ! 

Yet in a few hours all is changed. Christ has 
been arrested and His disciples, forsaking Him, 
have fled. The men who swore they would die 
with Him break their oath and run for their lives. 
Yonder in the council chamber of the high priest 
Christ is on trial, the very Christ Who at the com- 
munion table a while ago said: " This do in remem- 
brance of me." Among those who steal into the 
servants' hall on one side of the court is Peter. 
His cloak is drawn close about him. He is tur- 
baned so as to be scarcely recognizable. The night 
air is chilly and he draws near the fire to warm 
himself. 

Meanwhile the most unjust trial that ever dis- 
graced the annals of a court goes on. Jesus is ar- 
raigned. The Saviour is now among His enemies. 
They charge Him with blasphemy. They take 
council to kill Him. They spit in His face and 
smite Him with the palms of their hands and heap 
coarse ridicule on the gentle Christ. How does the 
disciple take all this? How does the man who 
said: "If I should die with thee I will not deny 
thee in any wise," handle himself now ? He warms 
himself. He is making himself comfortable. 
Directly a maid says : " And thou also wast with 
Jesus of Nazareth! " But he denied, saying: "I 



THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PERJUBY 165 

know not, neither understand I what thou sayest." 
This is the man who five hours before had sat at 
the communion table and said: " I will remember." 

And directly a maid saw him again, and began to 
say to them that stood by: " This is one of them," 
and again he denied. This is the man who three 
hours before had declared he would die sooner 
than deny. He has perjured himself. Then one 
who stood by said: " Surely thou art one of them, 
for thou art a Galilean, and thy speech agreeth 
thereto." But he began to curse and to swear, say- 
ing: " I know not this man of whom ye speak." 
And yet his lips are hardly dry from the commun- 
ion wine, and the breath of his vow is still on his 
face. In six short hours Simon Peter has plunged 
from the heights to the depths. 

How could he do such a thing? He has fol- 
lowed Christ for three years and seen Him work 
miracles. He has walked on the sea to meet Him 
and been present at the transfiguration. He has 
declared: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God ! " How under any circumstances 
could he get his consent to deny his Master ? How 
could he do it under the circumstances of the trial 
and with the suffering, deserted Saviour just yon- 
der through the door? It was time for him to 
rush in, and stand by and die, but instead, with 
oaths and curses he denies his Master. 

And the Bible records this story of shame. We 
do not get it from Christ's enemies, but from His 



166 THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PERJURY 

friends. The Bible has nothing to conceal. If it 
were a human book such an incident would be left 
out or glossed over. But the Book is divine. It 
tells all. It records the oath, and then relates how 
the chief apostle passed from that great vow to 
perjury. 

What does all this prove? Not that Chris- 
tianity is false, nor Christ an impostor, nor His 
teachings without value, nor the hour in the upper 
room meaningless. It does not brand Christian 
faith as a spurious thing, and brand Christ's fol- 
lowers as hypocrites. It only proves that men may 
fail, that the best of men may fall into the worst 
of sins, that human nature is weak, that tempta- 
tion is ceaseless, and that men of the highest gifts 
and the richest experience sometimes descend from 
heights of faith to depths of apostasy. 

Application 

Privilege does not prevent sin. The fact that 
one enjoys rare spiritual blessings does not insure 
against the possibility of a fall. One may be 
blessed with all the means of grace. He may come 
from a Christian home where the Bible and the 
prayer life obtain. He may be a member of the 
church and receive the sacrament. He may be 
regenerated and have a precious spiritual experi- 
ence and enjoy periods of great spiritual exhilara- 
tion, and yet go down in some great moral or spir- 
itual collapse. 



THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PEEJUEY 167 

The fact that one is a Christian, that he has 
experienced regeneration and become a child of 
God and an heir to glory, does not guarantee him 
against the possibility of falling into sin. Some- 
times we seem to think it does, and imagine that 
when one has become a Christian the fight is over. 
But not so. Often the real fight has just begun. 
Temptation is all the more insidious and trouble- 
some after one has taken his stand and begun to 
fight the good fight of faith. 

The Scriptures again and again record in- 
stances of the fall of God's servants. David was a 
man after God's own heart, but he fell. There is 
not a perfect man in the Old Testament. Peter 
was not alone. All the disciples fled. It is the 
same to-day. Good men go wrong. Sometimes 
ministers of the Gospel are guilty of the infamy 
which wrecks a home. They administer the holy 
sacrament and then go on to deeds in which they 
deny their Lord. 

It is a holy privilege to come to communion, to 
gather with Christ's friends around the table and 
partake of the sacramental emblems, to remember 
Jesus and plight to Him afresh our troth, to say in 
act if not in words: " If I should die with thee, I 
will not deny thee in any wise." Let us not, how- 
ever, conclude that there is no peril of a fall for 
us. It is possible to pass from the table to drunk- 
enness, to adultery, to dishonesty. The lips which 
touch the emblems of communion may profane 



168 THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PEBJTJKY 

God's name and deny the Saviour. The man who 
sat at the table may directly be sitting with Christ's 
enemies. " Let him that thinketh he standeth take 
heed lest he fall." Privilege does not prevent sin. 

There is no wall against temptation, no barrier 
that can keep it out, no armour that makes us 
immune. It found Christ. Jesus was tempted, 
and His temptation came shortly after His bap- 
tism, soon after the voice from heaven certifying 
His Sonship with God. No monk's cell, no pious 
cloister, no holy retreat, no sacred calling, can 
make us exempt. 

Sometimes the peril of temptation seems great- 
est along the border-line of our holiest experiences. 
Satan comes to us in the wake of spiritual victory 
and achievement. He takes us unawares. He 
steals in unobserved while we are off guard, in 
some moment of great religious joy. But do not 
conclude that it is impossible to resist him. We do 
not need to yield to temptation. It is the devil's 
lie to believe that because we are tempted we must 
fall, or that the presence of temptation is an ex- 
cuse for surrender. Christ refused to yield. Temp- 
tation must be resisted. When we resist the devil 
he flees from us. We cannot escape temptation. 
It came to the angels, and it comes to men even in 
holiest moments and places, but it can be fought 
off and vanquished. 

Our fall does not discredit Christ. It is bad on 
any cause when its adherents turn out badly. Peo- 



THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PEKJUBY 169 

pie are disposed to blame a cause for the short- 
comings of its advocates. Christ's cause does not 
escape. When Christians behave badly and drag 
their robes in the dirt and degrade the high calling, 
the world is disposed to say: " Christ is an im- 
postor. The Gospel is a superstition. The Bible 
is false." 

This does not follow. Because Peter passed 
from the upper room to perjury does not prove 
that Jesus was false or His teachings untrust- 
worthy or His work on the cross without value. It 
merely proves that Peter was a weak man. He 
denied Christ not because of what Christ was, but 
in spite of it. The fall of a Christian does not 
prove that the privileges of religion are worthless. 
Because Christ's disciples sometimes pass from the 
communion table to perjury, we are not to con- 
clude that the communion is an empty form. Be- 
cause some ministers are guilty of domestic infi- 
delity, it is not fair to brand all preachers as false. 
Let our critics be fair. The lapse is not because of, 
but in spite of, the teachings of Christ. 

Neither is it fair to conclude that the disciple 
who falls is spurious. Peter's fall was tragic, but 
it did not wreck his religious life nor destroy his 
soul. He was a redeemed man before he fell, 
during his denial, and after his spiritual collapse. 
God's work is permanent. The same truth is 
brought out in the experience of David and 
Thomas and others in the Bible. When one be- 



170 THE COMMUNION TABLE TO PERJURY 

comes a Christian, he is born again. His regenera- 
tion does not guarantee that he shall never sin, but 
it does guarantee that he will never be lost. Christ 
said: "I give unto them eternal life, and they 
shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out 
of my hand." When we fall, the devil would have 
us believe that all is over, that hope is dead. But 
this is the one thing we must never believe. 

The proof is in repentance. Peter wept. Judas 
had no repentance. If one who falls is really 
God's child, the mood of repentance will come. 
The fall is temporary. Peter's great day was 
ahead of him. The man who denied Christ in the 
servants' hall fifty days later preaches a sermon 
and thousands are converted. He becomes the 
foremost apostle of the early church. Who knows 
but some new power came to him through the 
awful experience on the dark night of his denial? 

The fall, however, does prove our need of con- 
stant reliance upon God for strength. Temptation 
comes, but there is a way to meet it. God has not 
promised to keep us from temptation, but to de- 
liver us in the midst of it, and not to suffer us to 
be tempted beyond that we are able to bear. Christ 
can give the tempted soul victory. He has prom- 
ised never to leave us. If only we will live close 
to Him, we shall pass not from the communion 
table to perjury, but to unbroken fellowship and 
triumphant service. 



XXIII 

CAN THE WORLD REPRODUCE 
CALVARY? 

" We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." 

— i John 3 : 16. 

THIS is a bold thing for a man to say. 
Does he realize what his words mean? 
Is he beating the air or is he ready for 
business ? We ought to lay down our lives for the 
brethren. This means that the people who repre-/ 
sent Christ on earth must meet Him at Calvary. 
They must meet Him there not to sing hymns and 
recite liturgies, not to hide behind the skirts of a 
tragedy that is to make them immune from pen- 
alty, not for the purpose of exploiting a creed or 
subscribing to dogmas which constitute their hall- 
mark of orthodoxy. They are to meet Him there 
at Calvary to die with Him, to match His passion 
with sacrifice, to become comrades of the cross and 
lay down their lives for the brethren. 

Thus the world is to be saved. Jesus did not die 
just to make us happy. It is a cheap diagnosis that 
finds nothing more heroic in Calvary than exemp- 
tion. Those who think of the Gospel as a scheme 
to play " safety first," as a project to rebuild the 
lost Eden, as a post mortem passport to Paradise, 

171 



172 CAN CALVARY BE REPRODUCED ! 

have not walked the thorn-path with the Son of 
God. Christ died for us that we "might die for 
others, because the only road to life for anything 
winds past a grave, because the only hope for this 
or any world is in people who love enough to make 
the supreme sacrifice. 

The communion would keep this in everlasting 
remembrance. Christ's death is saying that we 
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. It 
is a bold thing to say that we will. Is it too bold ? 
Is it so daring that none can be found to meet it ? 
Is it vain to hope that in the earth to-day may be 
found some with hearts prepared and souls afire 
to step out of the ranks and say: " We are ready " ? 
Peter said: " I will die for Him." True, he failed, 
but he had one glorious moment when his soul was 
big enough to say it and to mean it. Some who 
are ready to say as much and make good the vow 
must be found to-day, else civilization is doomed 
and the world lost. 

The World Outlook 

These are days when it is easy to be a pessimist. 
The world is full of strife and unrest. Forces 
have been released which threaten to destroy all 
that has been gained by the toil and struggle of 
the race. Views of human relations are being 
promoted which, if put into practice, would make 
hell a pleasure resort in comparison with earth. 
Governments are crumbling. Nothing any more 



CAN CALVARY BE REPRODUCED ? 173 

seems sacred. It has been suggested that even 
God Himself be abolished. In the presence of this 
riot of blasphemy and anarchy, the faith of some 
falters and fails. The outlook is dark and omi- 
nous. Men are asking: " Is civilization an impos- 
sible dream ? " 

There is, however, another side to the situation. 
There are elements in the outlook which signify 
a human efficiency and achievement never sur- 
passed. Man is more completely in possession of 
the mastery of material forces than ever before. 
His discoveries have wrested from nature some 
of its profoundest secrets. His inventions have 
harnessed land, sea, and sky, and made them his 
servants to an extent before undreamed. He has 
attempted the impossible and in some instances has 
accomplished it. What is there that he cannot do? 
He has dominion over every realm. He can rule 
anything. Yes, anything but himself. 

One does not need to be wise to find there is 
little hope of curing world unrest through man's 
mastery of nature and science, of trade and in- 
vention. Man was never more of a superman than 
he is to-day, and the inadequacy of his mastery of 
world forces to establish a sane social order was 
never more apparent. Something more is needed 
to straighten out this crooked world, to shame its 
lust and slay its selfishness, to destroy blasphemy 
and establish righteousness, to conquer hate and 
foster good will, something more is needed to 



174 CAN CALVAEY BE REPRODUCED f 

bridle the license which runs wild in the world to- 
day, and deliver us from perils which threaten to 
make civilization impossible, something more by 
far is needed than a superman's empire over na- 
ture. What is it ? 

We shall not find it short of Calvary. We are 
helpless until we fall back on the cross. What the 
world needs to-day is not eagerness to accumulate 
but willingness to spend, not genius for mastering 
material forces but a vision of spiritual values, not 
lust for power but passion for service, not a perch 
in the sun but a cross on a hillcrest. The world, 
needs a fresh infusion of the sacrificial spirit. 

We need the eyes of Calvary to see men as 
Christ saw them from the cross. They were not 
enemies He saw, though they drove the nails 
through His hands, for He prayed: " Father, for- 
give them." They were not criminals, for He said 
to the thief: "To-day thou shalt be with me in 
Paradise." They were His brothers. When we 
can look into a man's face, whether he be labourer 
or capitalist, whether he be Briton or Teuton, and 
see what the cross-crowned Christ saw, the broken 
world will begin to mend. 

We need the heart of Calvary, to feel toward 
men as Christ felt as He hung there on the cross. 
He did not hate them nor fear them. He loved 
them, because He died for them. He was more 
anxious to help them than to deliver Himself. He 
could have come down from the cross and declined 



CAN CALYAEY BE EEPEODUCED t 175 

sacrifice. It was love that kept Him there. It is 
love this worn world needs, not genius, not brains, 
not statesmanship, not money and power, — just 
love ; and God is love. 

We need the passion of Calvary. Then we shall 
do for men what Christ did. He was no prof- 
iteer, no wanton striker. He died for us. Neither 
man nor God could go further. " Greater love 
hath no man than this." What society needs is 
not to kill off a lot of undesirables. To be sure 
violence must be punished and anarchy stamped 
out, but the world will never be cleared of revolu- 
tion by killing people. There must be some who 
elect to die for the brethren if the world is ever to 
have a better day. This is the challenge the world 
throws at the Church. Can we reproduce Calvary ? 
Can we reenact the cross? 

The Challenge 

It is a challenge Christian men cannot ignore. 
The Church has come to its biggest opportunity 
since Calvary. The value of what it has to offer 
was never more apparent. Men are seeing that the 
objectives of the Christian Church are those of 
any civilization worth having. As never before, 
the sick world is turning to the Church for a help- 
ing hand. The Church is face to face with its 
largest opportunity, its most compelling hour, since 
Calvary. 

There are evidences that the Church is waking 



176 CAN CALVAEY BE KEPKODUCED ? 

to the challenge and trying to form its lines for 
larger things than man has ever yet attempted in 
God's name. Some of these plans are so vast, so 
far-reaching, so smashing of precedent, so revolu- 
tionary as to stagger and bewilder. Whether they 
are the crotchets of crazy enthusiasts or the states- 
manship of a Caleb-like faith remains for the fu- 
ture to reveal. 

But any movement that is to meet the needs of 
the world to-day must do more than perfect a 
splendid organization and project its plans on a 
world scale. It must do that. It must use ma- 
chinery and publicity and executive ability and 
everything that is an asset anywhere for God and 
His kingdom. But all this must be saturated 
through and through with the spirit of Calvary. 
The men who are behind the organization must be 
men who are comrades of the cross. 

Can the twentieth century reproduce Calvary? 
It can raise money. It can hold big conventions. 
It can muster numbers and arouse enthusiasm, but 
can it lay down its life? Can it produce men and 
women who deliberately elect to stay poor, who 
are content with obscurity, who are willing to wait 
for results, and if needs be, die with the nails in 
their hands and the thorns on their brow ? 

For such people the world waits. There is a 
value in sacrifice which earth cannot measure. It 
is sacrifice that brings us face to face with the only 
power that can save the world. It is sacrifice that 



CAN CALVAEY BE KEPKODTJCED ? 177 

lifts mediocrity to genius and widens provincial- 
ism out into world citizenship. 

The Sacrificial Spirit 

What the world needs to-day is a larger measure 
of the sacrificial spirit, — not of the sacrifice that is 
spectacular or that is punitive, but of the sacrifice 
that serves. It was a dead world to which Christ 
came two thousand years ago. It had burned it- 
self out in sin. Its ideals had rotted down in 
luxury and self-indulgence. Arrogance, cynicism, 
doubt, and despair were on every hand. Into that 
world of shame and decay, of sensuality and senile 
despair, Christ built Calvary, and from the hour 
He died on the cross there was hope. 

Can Calvary be built into the modern world ? It 
is no less than this that Jesus expects of His fol- 
lowers. He is not asking for influence and wealth 
and organization. He is asking for sacrifice, for 
people who are so wholly devoted to Him and the 
cause for which He died that they are ready to die, 
too. I do not mean that any man can atone for 
sin, that our cross can ever be a substitute for His 
cross, but if His cross is real to me, it must be an 
experience, and not merely a memory. 

Are we ready for the cross? Are we ready to 
carry it, to hang on it, to get crucified ? What are 
we out for? The biggest issue before the world is 
not internationalism or labour unionism or Bolshe- 
vism. It is not the red peril. It is the red hope, 
the scarlet, blood-dyed hope of Calvary ! 



XXIV 

MEMORY AND HOPE AT THE 
COMMUNION TABLE 

u This do in remembrance of me." — I^uke 22 : 19. 
" Christ Jesus our hope" — 1 Timothy i : 1. 

AS Christ's friends gather at the communion 
table, it is to keep the feast of love, to 
celebrate the rite by which faith pledges 
anew its loyalty to the Saviour. 

Memory 

It is an hour for memory. Christ instituted the 
Supper to keep His people from forgetting Him. 
" This do in remembrance of me." As we ap- 
proach the table, let memory cast its spell. 

Let us remember what the world was when 
Christ was crucified. It was a wild world. Force 
was in control. A large part of the human race 
was in slavery. Ignorance, illiteracy, and super- 
stition were widespread. Violence and crime were 
the order of the day. Degradation so base that it 
must be suggested rather than discussed was com- 
mon. Cities were cesspools of iniquity, and gov- 
ernment a name for oppression. This was the 
kind of world in which Christ lived. Let us not 

178 



MEMORY AND HOPE 179 

forget those days. Remembering them, we shall be 
less tempted to despair in these. 

For it is something of a wild world still. Forces 
which threaten society have broken their leash, and 
unless rebuked and restrained will result in wide- 
spread disaster. There is still the blight of igno- 
rance, illiteracy, and superstition, still the rough 
hand of violence, the red eye of lust, and the 
dripping talon of greed. But the world is less wild 
than it was. If Christ did not despair then, we 
need not now. If He saw enough of good in that 
wild world to die for it, surely we can find enough 
of good in ours to live for it. This is no time for 
despair. Let us remember until faith grows steady 
and we take a fresh grip on our work. 

Let us remember that innocence suffered. 
Christ did not deserve the treatment He got. He 
was no criminal. His was the purest life the world 
has known. His was the gentlest spirit that ever 
breathed among us. Jesus was the best man Who 
ever walked the earth. But He suffered, and His 
sufferings were real and great. Men suffer accord- 
ing to their power to feel rather than according to 
the blow that is struck. Christ's power to feel was 
infinite. His sufferings were indescribable. And 
withal, He was innocent. 

When we suffer without cause, let us remember 
Christ. It is not easy to suffer when one is con- 
scious of his innocence. If anything can make a 
man hate society, it is for society to punish him for 



180 MEMORY AND HOPE 

a crime of which he is not guilty. If there is any* 
thing that makes it difficult to cherish high ideals 
and keep on trying to do right, it is to know that 
you have not had a square deal. But when we are 
tempted to throw down our tools and quit be- 
cause those we have tried to help failed to play 
fair, let memory lead us by the hand into the pres- 
ence of that white light that was led as a lamb to 
the slaughter. 

Let us remember that Calvary was not a defeat. 
It looked so at the time. It looked as if hate had 
triumphed. As Christ hung there on the cross and 
His enemies cast lots for His seamless robe, and 
Herod and Caiaphas congratulated themselves on 
the successful accomplishment of the dirtiest day's 
work history records, it looked as though virtue 
was whipped. But we know now that it was not, 
that Calvary was Christ's supreme victory, that 
from that cross He had His crown. 

Let us remember that the cross is always this, 
and when we come to our Calvary, let us not be 
utterly cast down. Again and again the soul that 
tries to save the world must submit to crucifixion, 
but as the nails are driven in and the thorns and 
the spear, let every one who loves a cause better 
than he does his life remember the green hill far 
away, and the Man Who hung there until He be- 
came so lonely that He thought even God had for- 
saken Him. Remembering this, gloom and despair 
will vanish. 



MEMOEY AND HOPE 181 

Let us remember that Christ loved us. I could 
consent to give up everything but this, and still 
feel that I had enough left to make the morning 
sure. But if I shall ever reach an hour when I 
feel that Christ's love is dead, I shall know that the 
night has conquered, and that I am lost. Christ 
died on the cross to prove His love, a love so high 
that the topmost heavens are not higher, so deep 
that the bottom of hell is not deeper, so steady that 
time cannot change it, so constant that eternity 
cannot wear it out. Oh, to be able with all saints 
to comprehend the love that passeth knowledge! 
At the holy table let us remember the Saviour's 
love. 

If we will, we can stand anything. There is 
much we cannot understand, but if Christ loves 
us, we know that God is our Friend. If He is, the 
web of fate will untangle, and the long, winding 
road will end where welcome waits to greet the 
weary. 

Hope 

And so the holy communion is a place not only 
for memory, but for hope. Christ Jesus is our 
hope. As we look out on the wild world to-day, 
let us hope because we believe in Christ. He is 
able to handle the situation. With such a gospel, 
I am glad to be a preacher, because I have the 
remedy for a sick world, the only charm that will 
tame its wildness, the only call that will lure it 



182 MEMOEY AND HOPE 

from its jungle and transform it from a fear to a 
friend. 

When we are wronged, let us think of Christ, 
and stay sweet, and remain steady. Injustice is 
not permanent. Life's great reward is not what 
men may think. It is to hear His dear lips say: 
" Well done." 

" Men see thee, hear thee, praise thee not, 
The Master praises ; what are men ? " 

When the fight looks lost, let us think of the 
crucified Christ, and fight on. Let us think of the 
defeats that have been changed to victories. We 
fall to rise. " These light afflictions which are but 
for a moment shall work out for us a far more ex- 
ceeding and eternal weight of glory." 

" Then welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go." 

And when the day is dark and the way is long, 
and the burden heavier than we can bear, let us 
think of His love, until hope once more starts its 
clear song on our tired lips. 

"This do in remembrance of me." "Christ 
Jesus our hope." Memory and hope at the com- 
munion table! These are the twin angels of the 
life serene, and they greet us at the table of the 
King of Love. As we take the bread, let us re- 



MEMOEY AND HOPE 183 

member. As we touch to our lips the chalice of 
His blood, let us hope. There is no death for those 
who remember, and there is deathless victory for 
those who hope ! 



PRAYER AND DEVOTIONAL 



H. L. WILLETT and C. C. MORRISON 

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"The author has selected from each chapter of the 
Bible a keynote which epitomizes the thought and teach- 
ing of the entire chapter. These inspiring notes consti- 
tute an exposition of the most important facts and doc- 
trines of Holy Scripture." — Christian Work. 



E. M. BOUNDS 

Heaven 

A Place, A City, A Home. 

$1.25 

"Possessed of a wonderfully full 
knowledge of Holy Scripture, a man 
of unswerving faith and mystical 
insight, Mr. Bounds writes with a 
certitude, confidence and joyous an- 
ticipation of the eternal felicity 
awaiting the faithful believer. This 
book should be hailed with unfeigned 
satisfaction by devout Christian men 
and women." — Christian Work. 




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HEAVEN 

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EDWARD LEIGH PELL Author of "Secrets of 

— — — — — — — — — — — — Sunday School Teaching" 

What Did Jesus Really Teach About 
Prayer? $1.50 

Dr. Pell's new book is a helpful inquiry into the ques- 
tion of how the Christian of to-day should use prayer, 
the greatest weapon in his arsenal, and an emphasis of 
the fact that Christ in this, as in all other matters re- 
lating to spiritual life and growth, is the great Pattern 
for us all. 



ADDRESSES 



FREDERICK F. SHANNON ..^f^ ^,. 

The Economic Eden 

And Other Sermons. $1.25 

A new volume of discourses by an eloquent, gifted 
preacher. Mr. Shannon's extraordinary vocabulary, col- 
orful phrasing, and rich-robing of thought are all ap- 
parent — possibly in richer measure than in any of his 
former books. 

W. L. W ATKINSON 

Introduction by S. Parkes Cadman 

The Shepherd of the 
Sea 

And Other Sermons. $1.75 

"There is an amazing reaction of 
spiritual and intellectual uplift em- 
anating from these discourses. They 
are the utterances of a venerable 
man, but they overflow with an 
inveterate optimism, and one comes 
from the reading of them "like a 
giant refreshed." 

Christian Advocate, 




JOHN KELMAN 



Pastor of Fifth Avenue 
Pres. Church, N. Y. 



The Foundations of Faith 



$1.50 



The new volume of Cole lectures is by one of the fore- 
most and suggestive of living preachers. As always, Dr. 
Kelman's work is marked by strong, logical reasoning, 
distinctive thought, clothed in exceptional and choice 
language. 

/. M. HALDEMAN 



Ten Sermons on the Second Coming 

A New Edition. $2.50 

Dr. Cortland Meyers says: "Dr. Haldeman is a won- 
derful interpreter of Prophecy. This book will be a 
fountain of inspiration. It will open the eyes of many 
to a new vision of our Blessed Hope. 

CHRISTIAN H. SHIRR 

Twelve Live-Wire Questions in 
Religious Dynamics 

$1.00 

Twelve popular choicely illustrated lectures delivered 
before student groups at the University of Pennsylvania 
under the college Y.M.C.A. auspices. An up-to-the-minute 
book on religious questions. 



BIBLE STUDY 



P. WHITWELL WILSON 

Author of the "Christ We Forget" 

The Vision We Forget 

A Layman's Reading of N' 
the Book of Revelation. 

$2.00 

"Certainly this is the most en- 
tertaining treatise on the Revela- 
tion ever written. Will make the 
Revelation a new book in the 
reading of many Christians. _ It 
brings the Revelation down _ into 
the present day and makes it all 
intensely vital and modern." 

C. E. World. 




A REVELATION OF THE 
BOOK OF REVELATION 



THE VISION 
WE FORGET 



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J. J. ROSS 



The author of 
"The Kingdom in Mystery.'* 



Thinking Through the New Testament 

An Outline Study of Every Book In the 
New Testament. $1.75 

A course of study in the books of the New Testament. 
Dr. Ross has prepared a volume which can be used by 
the individual student as well as by study groups. 

FREDERIC B. OXTOBY 

Making the Bible Real 

Introductory Studies in the Bible. $1.00 

In simple, direct language, Dr. Oxtoby brings his 
readers into close, intimate contact with the wonderful 
story of God's chosen People, their Land, their History, 
their Prophets and their Literature. 

PHILIP MAURO Author of "The Number of Man" 

Bringing Back the King 

Another Volume on the Kingdom. $1.00 

Continuing his study of the Kingdom, the author in 
this volume sets forth the relation of King David with 
the Gospel. 

PHILIP MAURO 

Our Liberty in Christ 

A Study in Galatians. $1.25 

An exposition of Galatians from the standpoint that 
its main theme is "the Liberty wherewith Christ has 
made us free." Special attention is given to the unfold- 
ing of the remarkable "allegory" in Chapter TV. 



EVANGELISTIC WORK 



OZORA S. DAVIS 

President, 
Chicago Theological Seminary 

Evangelistic Preaching 

With Sermon Outlines and 
Talks to Children and Young 
People. $1.50 

"The best help on this important 
subject that we have ever seen. 
Sets forth with skill and complete- 
ness the method of evangelism that 
best appeals to the men and women 
of the present day." — C. E. World. 




X> 



EVANGELISTIC 
PREACHING 



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WILLIAM E. BIEDERWOLF 

Sec. The National Federated Evangelistic Committee 

Evangelism 

Its Justification — Operation — Value. $1.75 

"It is a text-book and a call. Every chapter is full 
of value. It tells how to give the invitation and how to 
conduct the after-meeting. It is a book for every one 
who is interested in doing evangelistic work." 

Herald and Presbyter. 

FREDERICK L. FAGLEY 

Executive Secretary Commission on Evangelism 
Congregation Churches. 

Parish Evangelism 

An Outline of a Year's Program. $1.00 

Mr. Fagley lays down a sensible, workable plan of 
work, including the formalities and maintenance of an 
evangelistic committee, a program of preaching, methods 
of personal work, deepening of the prayer-life, etc. 

J. W. PORTER 

The Assurance of Salvation 

And Other Evangelistic Sermons. $1.25 

"Sermons of the distinctly orthodox type and sug- 
gestive in outline and illustration. Warm the soul and 
stimulate the thought." — Evangelical Messenger. 

CHARLES FORBES TAYLOR (The Boy Evan- 

geiist) The Riveter > s gang 

and Other Revival Addresses. $1.25 

"The value of this book lies not alone in the anecdotes 
and sermons that it contains, but in the illustration of 
how a successful evangelistic preacher may enforce his 
teaching." — Lookout. 



PROBLEMS OF TODAY 



GEORGE McCREADY PRICE, MJL. 

Poisoning Democracy 

A Study of the Present-Day Socialism. $1.25 

Professor Price shows that the conditions prevailing 
today are due largely to the acceptance of various so- 
cialistic and evolutionary theories termed "New" Theol- 
ogy. No more terrific moral and religious indictment of 
Socialism has ever been presented. 

ALBERT CLARKE WYCKOFF 

The Non-Sense of Christian Science 

$1.75 

A deadly, withering attack on Christian Science en- 
filading its every position. Mr. Wycvoffs searching an- 
alysis of the pretensions, errors, follies, and non-sense of 
so-called Christian Science should prove as convincing as 
it is unanswerable. 

ALLEN W. JOHNSTON 

The Roman Catholic Bible and the 
Roman Catholic Church 

Foreword by David J. Burrell, D.D. $1.25 

A book that examines the cardinal doctrines as taught 
by^ the Church of Rome, such as the Invocation of 
Saints, Purgatory, Indulgences, Worship of Mary, the 
Holy Eucharist, etc. etc., and indicates the dissimilarity 
between this body of teaching and Holy Writ. 

New Editions. 
I. M. HALDEMAN 

Can the Dead Communicate with the 
Living? $1.25 

m "Needless to say, Dr. Haldeman holds no brief for Spir- 
itism. A book that is awakening everyone to the peril of 
'spiritualism' among Christians."-— Christian Work. 

JAMES M. GRAY, D. D. 

Spiritism and the Fallen 
Angels 
From a Biblical Viewpoint. 

$1.25 

"Beginning with a review of the 
present-day revival of Spiritism and 
how to meet it, Dr. Gray harks back 
to origins, the baleful influence of 
the cult from the earliest recorded 
history of the human race." 

S. S. Times. 




^ 



SPIRITISM 

AND THE 

FALLEN ANCELS 



Br JAMES H. GR AT. D. O, 



CHURCH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 



ROGER W. BABSON 

The Future of the Churches 

Historic and Economic Facts. $1.00 

Mr. Babson shows in a constructive way how the fu- 
ture prosperity and achievement of the church are de- 
pendent on its ability to enter fully into the manifold 
life of the people, and stand as firmly for social and 
civic righteousness as for the meeting and supplying 
distinctly spiritual needs. 

Pres. WILLIAM ALLEN HARPER 

Author of "The New Church For The New Time" etc. 

The Church in the Present Crisis $1.75 

Dr. Harper's new book is a refreshing, stimulating an- 
tidote to the host of works concerning the church's fail- 
ure and of mankind's growing worse and worse year by 
year. Dr. Harper is fully aware of what the church 
lacks and of the necessity for new methods and fresh 
life and he discusses various modus operandi which should 
lead to a larger increase of usefulness and power. 



P. E. BURROUGHS Autlwr of "The Present-Daw 

— — — — — — —— — — — Sunday School." 

Building a Successful Sunday School 

$1.50 

A valuable study of means and methods from the 
adoption of which the best results may be looked for, 
in the management of a large school. Dr. Burroughs 
writes out of a large experience, and his suggestions 
and plans of management are of an unusually valuable 
sort. 



ROBERT F. Y. PIERCE International Illustrator 

Blackboard Efficiency 

Illustrated $1.50 

A new book by the author of "Pictured Truth" and 
"Pencil Points" contains a new wealth of lessons on 
both the Old and New Testaments with sketches for 
blackboard work. The simplicity and charm of Dr. 
Pierce's work is well known. His "Chalk Sketches" are 
so simple that any teacher can draw them, yet wonder- 
fully pointed and helpful in bringing out the essence of 
the lessons. 



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